[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

[Christopher Leslie]

Thanks for initiating this interesting discussion, Janet. We had considered
making Diversity the theme of this year's SIGCIS workshop, and maybe we
dropped the idea too soon.

I agree that McPherson's article is not fully developed, but then again,
it's not a journal article. She conspicuously labels sections fragments and
is writing to explore. It's heartening to hear that several people are
using this as a conversation starter in their classrooms.

McPherson cites Winner and other scholars who border on a deterministic
analysis, and her writing walks that line too. However, we could also fault
her article for going the other way. Cultural determinism is as much a
fallacy as technological determinism, and we could fault her question that
way as well: just because Unix was developed in an era when racism was
keenly felt, does Unix have to somehow bear the mark of that culture?

However, the keenly expressed antagonism to this question seems
disproportionate. As a profession, we're willing to say that personal
computing carries traces of cold war culture (thanks to Edwards and
others), or that the economic and political system of the USSR made it
unlikely that a distributed communication system would develop (thanks to
Gerovitch). It's clear that we don't have the full picture of how the
interaction between the predominantly white, male culture at the time of
Unix's development would result in particular design decisions. At the very
least, though, we could assert that the particular kind of time-sharing we
got worked well with a community that was lacking in diversity.

Asking these kinds of questions is important because we are still dealing
with a community that is finding it difficult to diversify. The medical
profession, which also was largely white and male in the 1960s, made it a
professional imperative to diversify with the result that medical school
admissions are much different than they were 50 years ago. Engineering and
computer science have not been successful in that regard, despite noble
attempts in various corners. SIGCIS and other groups could make an effort
to explore the reasons for this failure.

Chris Leslie


On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 8/18/15 7:59 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 8/18/15 6:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul wrote:
>>
>>> Who came up with those
>>> changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11.
>>>
>>>
>> peek and poke were microcomputer additions
>>
>> The string editing things were additions from Tymshare for Super BASIC
>> on the SDS 940. I was told Super BASIC's extensions on the Harvard TSS
>> 940 system was the influence for those functions in Micro-Soft BASIC.
>>
>> RSTS BASIC on the PDP-11 had many of the same extensions which carried
>> forward into DEC's other implementations of the language.
>>
>>
> I found a collection of BASIC users manuals for many different systems in
> the CHM archives a while back, so bitsavers.org has a collection of
> many of them filed by manufacturer. I had been researching where the
> language changes originated from for a paper, which I never finished.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
> list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member
> posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list
> archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and
> you can change your subscription options at
> http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
>



-- 
Christopher S. Leslie, Ph.D.
Co-Director of Science and Technology Studies Program
Faculty Fellow in Residence for Othmer Hall and Clark Street
Vice Chair, IFIP History of Computing Working Group 9.7

NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering
5 MetroTech Center, LC 131
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(646) 997-3130

Office Hour Signup: http://tinyurl.com/chrisleslie
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/attachments/20150818/87299413/attachment-0002.htm>