CS students should know computer science history

I was in Bay Area, onboarding two new graduates from UC, Berkeley Computer Science department to KMS. We were joking maybe we should just call the sub team “golden bears”. As previously discussed, we prefer hand on laboratory based on-boarding training nowadays, rather than lecturing or asking new hires to read mountain of wiki documents. So we started with some excercises on Linux fundamentals. “Let’s write a ‘Hello World’ in Bash.” And we quickly found UC Berkeley didn’t teach their CS students much about Unix, or Linux, or whatever are considered hand on skills to survive Unix/Linux like systems. It is quite an irony since BSD Unix and their descendants makde major contributions to the Linux/Unix community, which is powering the whole Internet. “Do you know where did the operating system running on your MacBook come from?” … MacOS is a descendent of BSD Unix! https://lnkd.in/g735pAEf “Let’s edit the file using Vi” Err … They never or rarely used Vi editor. But Vi is also a major contribution from UC Berkeley. https://lnkd.in/gtKQycZZ “Studying philosophy is all about studying the history of philosophy”. I think the same model should apply to science and engineering learning. We can’t really understand Newton’s laws without some understanding of the historical context how Newton discovered these laws. Without the context, these laws become just a bouch of arbitrary equations we cramp into our mind for exams, then we forget about them immediately. Computer science and software engineering students need to know who Alan Turing is, who invented Unix and C programming language, and who wrote Git! UC Berkeley CS students should know something about BSD Unix, and be proud of their heritage! Eric S. Raymond summarizes the longstanding relationship between System V and BSD, stating, "The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs; programmers and technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more business-oriented types with AT&T and System V." Maybe the business-oriented types have won, after all?