[Sussex] I had this book...

[Trevor Marshall]

On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 16:15, Geoff Teale wrote:
> I think I had the 1979 edition - it's funny, but I know university
> graduates who didn't learn this level of computer science in their
> computer science degrees.  They spent their entire time on things that
> sat above the OS level.  It worries me that a level of "How computers
> work" expressed in a Ladybird book in 1971 is now (in some Unis at
> least) considered not important enough and too complex to teach to
> university students.

If my memory serves me right (it was a looooong time ago) the 1971
edition was a "recommended" book for the computing part of my Elec Eng.
Uni course in ... ummm ... about 1976/1977.  I think that was when we
"did" computing - coding in FORTRAN on punched cards - put the card deck
in the pigeon-hole and wait a week for the output. "Syntax error line
6".  And people say there's no progress :-)

> It's like there's this implicit assumption that people won't need to
> implement Operating Systems again as they've already been done.  I see a
> danger that we'll reach a point in the future where there are very few
> people left alive who really understand how computers work... *shudder*

There might be more in that than you think.  Most OSs build on previous
implementations one way or another; here and now the best documented and
most accessible starting points for an OS are the various free UN*X
clones.  They may not be the best OSs for everything - hard real-time
for example - but they are good general purpose OSs and make a good
enough starting point for anything else you might want to do.  Writing
OSs from scratch is *hard*.  Even building on a previous system is
difficult enough.

Just my GBP0.02 worth.

-- 
Trevor Marshall