Re: My First Computer (was Computing Editorial)

["Kelly Hall" <hall@priest.com>]

"Exegete" <millers@noneofyourbusiness.com> wrote in message
3E4581A7.2080505@noneofyourbusiness.com">news:3E4581A7.2080505@noneofyourbusiness.com...
> The point isn't what OS/Language/Application you use, but that you said
> you had no idea what CP/M was. I really don't see how someone with a
> degree Computer Science would be able to say the first seven words of
> this sentence:

It's pretty easy to ignore trivial program loaders like CP/M when there's
barely enough time in the schedule to cover resource allocation and
scheduling, memory management strategies, virtual memory replacement
algorithms, process scheduling, interprocess scheduling, file systems,
deadlock, and livelock.  CP/M has a place in my heart, and it might be
interesting to mention it as an efficient implementation, a well as from its
historical significance.  But from a "computer science" point of view,
there's no meat there - operating systems 10 years older had substancially
more features.  Why study CP/M when Multics and OS/360 are available?

> I suppose you have no idea what the 4004, 8008, or 8080 were either?
> Nor the Z-80, 8085, 9900, 6800, 6809, 6502.
> If so, you need to trot down to your university and demand a refund.

While every part you mention has some history and engineering tradeoffs with
it, should kids delve into the differences between the 8080 and Z80 or
should they learn about deep-versus-shallow pipelines, out of order
execution strategies, cache units, VLIW, branch delay slots, branch
prediction units, and other features of modern CPUs?

> PS: I don't have a degree in computer science, but I do have degrees in
> History, Philosophy and Theology. And I have run CP/M, MS-DOS, PC-DOS,
> DR-DOS, TRSDOS, AppleDOS, ProDOS, SOS, LisaOS, MacOS, OS/2, and, perhaps
> someday, Linux.

Most of those "operating systems" are totally uninteresting from the point
of view of "computer science", if only because they are too small (both in
resources and in number of users).  Heck, of the twelve you list only 4 have
process schedulers, and of those, two are cooperative
ultitaskers.  -snooze-

Kelly