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

[Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com>]

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Steve Jenkin suggests: "Developers of Initial Unix arguably were 10x-100x
more productive than IBM OS/360..."

Indeed, this is part of accepted UNIX lore. However, to me, "productivity"
in this context is a measure of how much time it takes to implement a
specified objective. UNIX did not have a specified objective. From "The
UNIX Time Sharing System," (Ritchie & Thompson):

"Perhaps paradoxically, the success of UNIX is largely due to the fact that
it was not designed to meet any predefined objectives."

So, does this productivity advantage really mean anything? It's comparing a
research project to an industrial development.

The UNIX development methodology would seem to be this: Get a very small
number of top people together with a common vision, ideally fewer than
three, and see what happens. However many mistakes were made on the OS/360
project (very completely documented by Brooks), the need for an OS for the
emerging 360 series would probably not have been met by the "see what
happens" approach.

Marc

On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 12:27 AM Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:

> On 7/2/24 9:51 PM, sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au wrote:
>
> > I’ve never seen a large Open Source project succeed when attempting to
> use modern “Project Management” techniques.
> >
>
> Managing an open source project is like herding a pack of alpha male
> tomcats with their own agendas that you can't fire.
>
>
>

-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*

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