11 Oct
2019
11 Oct
'19
11:20 p.m.
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 01:13:37PM -0400, Jim Geist wrote:
My college had a big schism between the computer
services department that
serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the
actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad
classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I
learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account
and started seeing how much more elegant things were.
Our CS department had a mainframe as well, also a handful of 11/750s and
11/780s. The compiler class was taught on the mainframe, the prof had
a lex/yacc clone he had written and wanted us to use that.
My buddy Rob Netzer and I had 3B1 (Unix PC) or maybe 2, I think I had
one as well, and we asked the prof if we could do the class on those.
Rob had to write the lex/yacc clone to be compat with the profs, he
did and we happily avoided using the mainframe. We were very sold
on Unix by then.