Toronto high school expels Linux lab

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Ahmad <transoxania-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org>
| 
| Sy Ali wrote:

| > But nooo.. DOS and later Windows 3.1.. or the alternative was an array
| > of ICONs.  Nobody took those seriously.
| > 
| > The same goes with programming.. As a starting language I had Turing
| > instead of BASIC.  Sigh.

| ICONs actually ran a flavour of UNIX at least that's what the admin told me
| when I was in high school.

QNX, actually.  Definitely not UNIX, but partly inspired by UNIX.
Internally quite different, of course. QNX was first called QUNIX;
I heard that AT&T lawyers' attention convinced them to rename it.

A much better system than MSDOS for what it was used for.  But there
were problems with deployment:

- the servers and network were overcommitted.  This made them very
slow.  (Only the servers had hard drives.  A good idea but left the
system open to saturation.)

- the hardware was made to government contract.  Expensive.
Overengineered.  Product cycles were too long.  So PC hardware
advanced more quickly.

- the marketplace was small so there were only a few software
producers and products.  I think that the products were actually good,
but limited.

Note: I never used an ICON.

I did know the designers and implementors of Turing.  Ric Holt's group
at the U of T -- good guys.

I also know the implementor of Logo, Richard Miller.  In fact, for a
brief while (a week or two) it was being developed in my basement.

(Richard was the first person to complete a port UNIX, even before
Bell Labs (by a week or two).  He is also a full-time Plan 9 user.)

|  Turing is a far better language to start off with
| than BASIC.  At least Turing has a formal concept of a pointer  and is
| procedural.

Yes.

And I personally think that Logo is an even better choice for the very
starting language.  None of the fussiness of a language of the Algol
family.  Don't get me wrong, I think that the fussiness is important
eventually, just not in the first few weeks.

Basic?  Nothing to recommend it except possibly some good books.
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