UNIX history made easy

[gwyn at BRL.MIL]

In article <40101 at bu-cs.BU.EDU>, madd at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost) writes:
> This is just another lesson in history: you can be more effective if
> you know of the successes and failures of your predecessors, but you
> can get the same job done that they did without knowledge of them --

I disagree.  The majority of inventions haven't occurred yet.
Ignorance of what HAS been figured out is a severe handicap, and it
is by no means certain that any given person will be able to recreate
the discoveries, even if he had the time and other resources to do so.

Yes, you can quite nicely code business applications in COBOL, devise
data compression algorithms for sequential machines, and many other
tasks without having a solid foundation of knowledge across the field
of computer science.  But if you're so self-limited in your abilities,
you shouldn't advertise yourself as a computer-science generalist.