UNIX history made easy

[Jim Frost]

In article <11239 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
|The point is, if you don't know who Backus, Dijkstra, Hoare, Knuth,
|Thompson, Wirth, etc. are and what their major accomplishments were,
|you shouldn't advertise yourself as a professional computer scientist.

You are mistaken.  While I admit that knowledge of what they have done
will aid you in being a computer scientist, that knowledge will not
make you one and lack of it does not necessarily degrade your ability
(although it probably will, especially for certain applications).

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 --
it may just take a lot longer.  I only wish that politicians would
learn this lesson.

jim frost
software tool & die
madd at std.com