[TUHS] 8th Edition Research Unix on SIMH

[Grant Taylor]

On 03/28/2017 06:49 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> But if people just have to press a button (basically), they won't learn
> anything. I guess I'm not understanding the point of the exercise? To say they
> have V6 running? So what? All they did was press a button. If it's to
> experience a retro-computing environment, well, a person who's never used one
> of these older systems is going to be kind of lost - what are they going to
> do, type 'ls -ls' and look at the output? Not very illuminating. (On V6,
> without learning 'ed', they can't even type in a small C program, and compile
> and run it.) Sorry, I don't mean to be cranky, but I'm not understanding the
> point.

Conceptually I agree.

However, I've had to teach enough people to know that they need a way to 
boot strap themselves into an environment to start learning.

Thus I find having a streamlined process available to them to be 
beneficial.  Then once they have gotten a taste, presuming they like it, 
they can go back and attempt to do more complicated things.

I do consider what (I believe) Warren put together for the UUCP project 
to be a very good start.  Simple how to style directions that are easy 
to follow that yield a functional system.

Conversely, take a look at what's involved in IPLing a minimal MVS 3.8j 
system in Hercules.  (Ignoring the turn key packages.)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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