# CS students should know computer science history

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I was in Bay Area, onboarding two new graduates from UC, Berkeley Computer Science department to KMS.\
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We were joking maybe we should just call the sub team “golden bears”.\
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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.\
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So we started with some excercises on Linux fundamentals.\
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“Let’s write a ‘Hello World’ in Bash.”\
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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.\
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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.\
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“Do you know where did the operating system running on your MacBook come from?”\
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…\
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MacOS is a descendent of BSD Unix! <https://lnkd.in/g735pAEf>\
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“Let’s edit the file using Vi”\
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Err …\
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They never or rarely used Vi editor.\
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But Vi is also a major contribution from UC Berkeley. <https://lnkd.in/gtKQycZZ>\
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“Studying philosophy is all about studying the history of philosophy”.\
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I think the same model should apply to science and engineering learning.\
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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.\
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Computer science and software engineering students need to know who Alan Turing is, who invented Unix and C programming language, and who wrote Git!\
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UC Berkeley CS students should know something about BSD Unix, and be proud of their heritage!\
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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."\
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Maybe the business-oriented types have won, after all?<br>
