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From: <Unknown> (L. Darrell Ray)
Subject: Re: language marketing question, was Re: What is wrong with OO ?
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In article <5cugeo$1bno@uni.library.ucla.edu>, jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin) says:
>
>ell@access5.digex.net (Ell) writes:
>
>>Luther Hampton (lhampton@erols.com) wrote:
>>: Colleges at the time were using minicomuters to teach computer science
>>: because they were relatively cheap and much more accessible and flexible
>>: than a mainframe.  At the time, DEC sat firmly atop the minicomputer
>>: market, so colleges bought a lot of DEC hardware.  Needless to say,
>>: colleges were much happier to use Unix and C on their PDP-11s. They cost
>>: nothing, they had free source code, and you could do anything you wanted
>>: with them.  Guess what happened?  Everybody learned Unix and C. C became
>>: a sort of lingua franca, not so much because it was superior, but
>>: because everybody learned it.  Likewise, everybody knew Unix, and,
>>: through the academic world and AT&T, Unix and C became available for
>>: other prcessors, also as freeware.  The bottom line was, although
>>: RSX-11M was clearly a superior OS, and C was not viewed at the time as
>>: offering superior features, they were cheap and not bad.  As Consumer
>>: Reports once said about the difference between some car an a Mercedes, a
>>: Mercedes is clearly the best car in the world, but maybe its just as
>>: well to spend one fourth as much and settle for a car that's "merely"
>>: very good.
>
>>This jibes with my observations.  And it is a major slap against the view
>>that UNIX and C became significant allegedly because software engineering
>>is synonomous with myopic, non-holistic, hacking.
>
>It seems to me to indicate the opposite.  It was not picked for its
>superior qualities in a rational fashion to further the field.
>Instead academia declared "Just Hack it" as they didn't care about or
>understand good software engineering properties.  If "real life
>software engineering" was not synonomous with myopic, non-holistic,
>hacking, then they would have picked languages and software methods
>more conductive to good software engineering practices (in the pure
>sense).  
>
>Maybe your point is that it was available and "free" and thus was like
>a random act of nature that then took off because programmers got used
>to it.  Still it was a "choice" by the academic dept to install and
>do research with the OS.

Wrong! The trade-offs made were considered and rational.	

systems = hardware + software
Given X amount of money which is the best method for teaching about computers?
a)	Buy one or two of the best available systems and have each student only 
be able to use a computer only a few hours each term at restricted times
or
b)	Buy several (lots :-) of systems and allow amost unlimited access to the computers

Having had to suffer with a course that choose option A (COBOL on a Burrough 
mainframe in the mid 70's) I can state that option B is much better.

What many schools did was buy used hardware and run UNIX.  This allowed the
school to buy 2 or 3 computers for the cost of each new one and to buy 
several more for the cost of the commerical OS and compilers. 





	
