[TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 10:01 AM Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:

> > On 7/3/24 8:17 AM, Vincenzo Nicosia wrote:
> >
> >> I think it would be terribly misleading to teach young CS students that
> >> software projects should be managed "as Unix v6 came to life". They will
> >> never, ever find anything even close to that environment in a
> >> professional workplace.
> Also, it is unlikely they will ever bootstrap an operating system from
> scratch.
> No company would invest its resources doing so when they can find something
> for free that will be "good enough".
> It isn't even likely they will implement any major new libraries or
> compilers
> and will just use what is out there already. Again, a project "make vs buy"
> even if the "buy" is free as in beer.
>

Yea, even in the 80s when I was in school, the CS department switched from
running the HW simulator on the HW in question, and we had to write
everything
to bring up the HW on the DEC-20 (well, simplified DEC-20) to linking in
your code
to the SunOS kernel on the 68k Sun3 machines that were plentiful and doing
the
debugging on real hardware. I'm not sure there's a lot of students that
have done
a full, from scratch, bootstrap of a real OS (or even a Toy one) these
days...  Though
a lot of activity there has shifted to the cheap embedded world where it's
easy to
write a bare-metal app that has many of the features of an OS, but in some
weird,
specialized way.

Warner

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