[Techtalk] Linux in Higher Learning

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 07:06:30PM +1000 or thereabouts, jenn at simegen.com wrote:
> the unseen wrote:
> 
> > The point is the IT "professionals" 
> > that are coming out of college today have been brainwashed by their 
> > professors and the current media trends.  How can this be combatted? 
> > How can we correct this? 
> Infiltrate! :)
> If your universities are like ours, there's a shortage of lecturers.
> If you have time & a degree, teach a course!

At university level: computer society. 

The computer society in Swansea in 1990 had, um. One box. Called
Galaxy and running UNIX of some description. They had a guest account,
I remember that bit :) It had no sources, of course, and when someone
managed to delete init (!), it took two weeks of messing about and
writing stuff on other machines to feed to this one to get it back
up. (And within ten minutes of it being back up, the MUD it ran was
full again.)

People begged and borrowed and scrounged, made it evident to all
departments that they'd take anything going (the number of terminals
I helped carry from one department which was junking its old setup,
oh my word..) and very luckily, there was Minix, the promise of
386BSD and then Linux. And at the time, your own email address which
external people could send to was an _incredible_ lure. (As was "we
have telnet. You can play MUDs!") I think even comp sci students
only had internal email at the time. 

And whilst the other departments were all moving to nice integrated
solutions, the comp soc acquired more stuff and put Linux on them
(eventually), and got them on the net, and encouraged students from 
any department to join. And they joined, and they went away when their
course finished.

And years later I am back in contact with some of them, and I get
"That thing on the computer society machines? Was that Linux? See,
I saw a boxed set recently, and apparently it does graphics now?
And Windows just ate all my dissertation. What do I need for this
Linux thing?" 

This isn't happening daily, no. But I can think of oh... half a dozen 
non-computer science comp soc members who have in the last year asked 
me about how they get that Linux thing. (And two who specifically
mentioned they'd lost academic work when Windows crashed.) Which they 
are remembering from anywhere between 1992 and 1995, from the machine 
that had a lot of networking stress-testing (okay, crashes) and from a 
time when I think we might have had a machine or two that ran X, if that. 
Until writing this email, I hadn't thought of the Linux that they will
have been remembering, in fact.

And now the comp soc has its own (lockable, card-key) room in the 
Student Union building (I think the deal was that they'd cable the 
building and set up a website or something) and it has machines, and
space for people to bring in their own computers, and whilst the library 
terminals run Windows and are under extreme space pressure, comp 
soc members can get to their stuff from anywhere, and Things Don't 
Crash whilst they're finishing their assignments. And they get used 
to Unix, and they get used to free software (even if they can't write 
a line of code, they can find help to locate, download and install 
something they need), and they get used to not having visual basic 
viruses and they get used to the idea that if they want to work on
something on more than one machine, .doc is not the format to save
it in.

And when they leave, they have used both, and they can make their
own informed decisions.

Telsa