[TUHS] Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Marc Donner]

Back in the mid-to-late 1980s I was the ringleader of the UNIX underground
at IBM Research.  Interestingly, we were for a couple of years the largest
non-academic customer for Sun Microsystems on the east coast of the US.

When IBM bought ROLM, a maker of telephone equipment, they were confronted
with ROLM's insistence on using Sun equipment (and UNIX in general) for
their software development.

So a stream of IBM executives made their way to my office in Yorktown
Heights to try to figure out whether this demand was for real.

I would show them my development environment (emacs and make plus a bunch
of ancillary tools) and demonstrate how I could edit code, build, test, and
debug quickly and smoothly.

After half a dozen VPs came through, they agreed and placed a large order
with Sun for ROLM.  That might have helped the business case for a better
AIX, but I'm not sure.
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 7:35 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:

> At 2024-07-03T08:59:11-0600, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> > Steve Jenkin suggests: "Developers of Initial Unix arguably were
> > 10x-100x more productive than IBM OS/360..."
> >
> > Indeed, this is part of accepted UNIX lore.
>
> That claim reminds me of a more general one.  Applied to software
> development writ large, it seems to be lore, not a reproducible
> scientific result.
>
> I refer of course to Sackman, Erickson, and Grant's 1968 CACM paper
> which documented a DARPA experiment that found a productivity range of
> 28:1 in their sample of programmers (with veterans of 7 years'
> experience pitted against "trainees").  Naturally enough, plenty of
> people who make claims about variance in programmer productivity are
> unaware of this paper's existence; it's not actually relevant to them as
> a source of knowledge.
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20120204023412/http://dustyvolumes.com/archives/497
>
> Thomas Dickey, better known today as the maintainer of ncurses, xterm,
> lynx, and mawk (all for 30 years or more, and among other projects),
> published a critique of this study in 1981.
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20120204023555/http://dustyvolumes.com/archives/498
>
> Bill Curtis published a critique of the Sackler et al. paper in 1988.
>
> I quote (via Dickey):
>
> "Sackman's ... message that substantial performance differences do exist
> among programmers remains valid.  Detecting a 20+:1 range ratio depends
> upon having one brilliant and one horrid performance in a sample.
> However the range ratio is not a particularly stable measure of
> performance variability among programmers.  The dispersions of such data
> as appear in Table I are better represented by such measures as the
> standard deviation or semiinterquartile range."
>
> https://invisible-island.net/personal/paperstuff.html
>
> We have likely all observed how this 28:1 ratio has bloated in retelling
> over time, like the length of a fish catch, to 100:1 or even 1000:1.
> Similarly we're all familiar with the common practice of presenting the
> mean and sometimes the range of some data sample to support one's
> argument, without mentioning the median or mode, let alone the variance
> (or the standard deviation).  (If a member of one's audience is familiar
> with non-Gaussian distributions and inquires whether one's sample may be
> better characterized by one, you invite them to disengage from the
> discussion.)
>
> I assert that this "productivity gap" is a myth, and that it persists
> because it serves the purposes of diverse audiences who adopt it with
> motivated reasoning.
>
> 1.  Immature Unix enthusiasts like to reassure themselves, and others
>     nearby, of their inherent superiority to rival programmers.
>
> 2.  Managers like to contrive reasons for (not) promoting individual
>     contributors.  It's easy to cite this productivity "statistic" and
>     then suggest, without indicating anything concrete, that an employee
>     is either a rock star or a mediocrity.
>
> 3.  Directors in organizations like not having to further justify a
>     "stack-rank and cut" approach to reducing salary and benefits as a
>     proportion of operational expenditures.
>
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
>
> 4.  Business culture in general is deeply wedded to the idea that
>     individual productivity, merit, or capacity for "wealth creation" is
>     variable by several orders of magnitude, because this claim
>     "justifies" variance in compensation over a similarly large range,
>     even among college-educated professionals in an organization,
>     setting aside those members of staff whose collars shade more toward
>     blue.  (Outsourcing is useful in increasing opacity, segregating
>     workers, and setting them up to have conflicting interests.)
>
>     If people start applying their capacity for critical thought to the
>     proposition that the CEO is 40,000 times more productive than a
>     "Software Engineer II", nothing good will happen.
>
> _Is_ "productivity" among programmers, however defined and measured,
> nonuniform?  Likely yes.  Has our industry studied the question in a
> serious way, applying rigorous experimental design and statistical
> analysis?  Perhaps not.
>
> And if we did, would any of the people making this claim read or
> comprehend the research if it didn't support their biases?
>
> You already know the answer.
>
> We utter myths about falsifiable propositions not because we care about
> their truth values, but precisely because we don't.
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>
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