[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[Sanatan Rai]

On 7 November 2010 15:19, Richard Jones <rich at annexia.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 05:20:19PM +0000, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>> Yes, some of the brave souls I was at Uni with had working linux
>> desktops by the mid 90s. I remember my mate Dave fighting with his
>> Ollivetti 486 DX25 for nearly a week to get X working, let's not pretend
>> that was a viable solution for widescale deployment to end users back
>> then! ;)
>

   Just to add a few data points:

    * In my undegraduate institution in the early '90s the default platform
       was hp-ux on HP superminis. Various labs had their own mix of
       HP/Sun workstations, and there was a Convex C220 for general
       use of those with draconian computational requirements.

   * By the time I was graduating in the mid-'90s, many professors were
     moving on the linux boxes as their desktop machines as opposed
     to old Sun boxes or dos computers they used to log on to the unix
     machines.

   * I spent one year in a research institute thereafter where the default
     desktop in my school as a linux box running X. If memory serves they
     ran debian.

   So it was certainly possible to go spend the entire 90s decade without using
windows. No one considered it as anything more than a toy platform for some home
users. All the CS teaching expected people to use unix boxes to write
programmes.
Common languages were C/C++ (more C than C++, this was pre STL remember),
Lisp, Fortran (fluid dynamics, Mech Engg etc), occasionally
Pascal/ProLog, Tcl/Tk,
ML or whatever took an instructor's fancy. In the introductory data
structures class
for CS students, they were assigned a homework that had to be done in
C++. So they
were expected to pick up the language and turn in the assignment within a week.
This sort of thing (par for the course by the way) wouldn't have been
possible without unix.

--Sanatan

-- 
Sanatan Rai
3, Admirals Court,
30, Horselydown Lane,
London, SE1 2LJ.
+44-20-7403-2479.
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug