Cowell College - Winter 1999

General Overview and Purpose of the Course

What's it about?

Cowell 80G is a course in language and culture: the language and culture of a particular class of high-powered general-purpose computing machines. It is definitely not a course on computer science. Some elementary topics in computer science may be useful context and background now and then, but that is just like the way some elementary anthropological knowledge about Navajo culture might be relevant background to the literary study of a novel set in a Navajo community. The main focus is on developing a literate understanding of one particular language for communicating with computers.

The course is focused not on either IBM-compatible or Macintosh-compatible personal computers, but on the Unix operating system. Cowell 80G teaches the fundamentals of intelligent computer use through an introduction to the Unix operating system, its command language, and some of the programs that Unix makes available.

What's Unix?

Unix is the operating system for most of the machines used for really serious work by experts in fields like software development, film special effects, running server machines for Internet service providers, and so on. This includes the campus time-sharing machines for students to log in on: si, am, ese, angus, and ucscb, plus all the Sun workstations and many of the IBM PC-compatible microcomputers in the computer labs.

Unix was developed originally for machines that were considered very powerful for their time, especially for powerful machines designed to serve many users simultaneously; but it is turning up increasingly on individual-use microcomputers, even small notebook computers. It is constantly spreading to new sites and new machines, and it now seems clear that it will be important for decades, way into the next century (and millennium).

Unix is generally thought of as being for experts only, but Cowell 80G teaches Unix in a nontechnical way to non-science and non-engineering-inclined students who have no previous experience of computer use - and to teach it rather in the way that foreign languages and cultures are taught, through examples and practice and careful and analytical explanation when troublesome points are reached. (I am quite serious about the language and culture aspect. I actually treat computers as if they were nonhuman semi-intelligent alien beings with whom one has to accomplish the difficult feat of communicating without sharing their form of life.)

What prior experience is assumed?

The level really is introductory, and if you are already browsing directory structures and customizing your .cshrc and maintaining a web page, Cowell 80G is not for you; it'll be familiar stuff and you'll hate yourself. On the other hand, if you have no idea what a .cshrc is but are prepared to learn things if there is some serious point to them, then this course might well be just right.

What's the aim?

This course attempts to liberate people from the infantilizing influence of Windows 95. With a Windows computer you tend to end up clicking on things but having very little grasp of what goes on back there as a result of your clicking. If things come when you click for them, fair enough, but if anything goes wrong it is utterly baffling, and there is little opportunity to delve, explore, understand, and set things right. It is like driving an automatic-transmission, power-steering, electronic-fuel-injection car: you hope it runs, but if something goes wrong there is no realistic hope that you can strip things down and work on them yourself.

Unix allows you to figure things out and fix things - without you having to become an engineer. Unix doesn't just show you a menu and tell you to order from it; it lets you in the kitchen and enables you to see how to cook things. If you want a better understanding of what actually goes on when you access the Internet, a chance to put your own home page on the World Wide Web and understand what you've done, and make computers do complex things at your command without you having to turn into a programmer, Cowell 80G is just right for you.

Not a snooze-through!

It is important this is a snooze-through course; it is a straightforward and interesting way of getting five credits, but not a falling-off-a-log no-requirements easy way. People do fail this course. To pass it you have make regular use of the Unix system, stay in touch with your TA, attend lectures, turn in assignments, pass a few tests and exams, and do some hard thinking.

It is always the case with courses in languages, of course, that you cannot just learn up factual material for quizzes and leave it at that. You have to exert yourself, use the language, interact, make mistakes, get involved, and try to incorporate it into your behavioral repertoire. If you won't, then a language course is close to useless to you. You cannot possibly become a French speaker by refusing to participate in class, avoiding French people, and doing a little night-before cramming to squeak a pass in quizzes. You don't even start to be a French speaker until you get out there and embarrass yourself in conversation with French people. You have to make mistakes, recover from them, keep on trying to get communication going in French, and ultimately make French forms of expression a part of your life. It changes you. And so will learning Unix. But only if you use it, try things out, log in every day, use the reference books, and exert yourself. If you do this course in a minimalist way, it will be of no value. If you do it in a whole-hearted way, it will start to be fun, and it will be of permanent value.

What's the practical use?

What value is it? Cowell 80G is the only course I am aware of on this campus that is definitely known to have contributed in a significant way to one of its alumni winning an Oscar. An early alumnus of this course went to work for Industrial Light and Magic and was a co-recipient of the Oscar for the special effects in the film Forrest Gump. Another alumnus of this course has worked as a lawyer on a computer copyright infringement case that went as high as the Supreme Court of the United States (and his side won, too!). This course will help you to become something of an expert with computers, and that will have real effects on your future employability.

Required Text

The main required book is really cheap: Unix in a Nutshell: System V Edition, by Daniel Gilly and the staff of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Second edition, 1992. 444 pp., ISBN 1-56592-001-5. O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, California.

This is not an easy-explanation textbook (there are many of those, but I find many of them rather sickeningly patronizing; buy one if you can find one that doesn't turn your stomach). Unix in a Nutshell is a beautifully organized, serious desk reference work for grownups, a book to keep permanently. It is dense and technical, but authoritative, easy to search, and amazingly cheap. Go to the Bay Tree Bookstore and grab one. You need your own copy of this book.

What topics are covered?

Registering for an Athena computer account; the language of the C shell command interpreter csh (`Cshellese'); the Berkeley mail program; the Internet (and to some extent the World Wide Web); file management (ls, mv, cp, rm, ftp, . . .); directory structures (cd, pwd, mkdir, . . .); text formatters; utilities for searching, sifting, and sorting text (sed, tr, sort, the grep family, awk, find); pipelines; control structures (if, while, foreach); and writing simple interactive shell scripts. (If a lot of this looks like Greek to you, that is fine. No prior experience required. But in three months you will know about all of the above.)

What requirements does it satisfy?

Cowell 80G satisfies a T2 (Natural Sciences) general education requirement. It also is tailor-made to satisfy the graduation requirement for Cowell students. It was developed for that purpose. But this does not mean there is any reason why a Cowell student should take it. There are many other courses that fulfill the requirement. Computer and Information Sciences Board (CIS) and Computer Engineering (CE) offer many, including several very successful introductory courses for nonspecialists. Think about what you want before you decide. Cowell 80G will not tell you anything about how you might better exploit the abilities of your Macintosh or IBM-compatible PC; it will virtually not touch anything to do with numerical computations, financial programs, or graphics. It isn't intended to do these things.

What other courses is this one most similar to?

Cowell 80G is really rather like a language or linguistics course, except that it provides you with much more individual conversational experience. It aims to introduce students to non-numerical computing using the Unix operating system, largely focussing on text handling - reading and writing and finding and sending and editing and formatting and scanning and searching and modifying and chopping and sorting and polishing and printing and publishing ordinary natural language text like stories and poems and essays and novels and letters and electronic mail messages. It's a course for readers and writers and all kinds of intelligent non-geeky people. You are welcome to read the reviews of last winter's offering of the course, available for your perusal at the office of the administrative assistant to the Cowell College Provost.

(2 credits)
Call #: 32094

The course this quarter will be linked to the Cultural Break theme of Paris between the two World Worlds. We will take a multidisciplinary approach, looking at politics, society, the arts, and literature during this turbulent and intensely creative period. Guest lectures on topics such as the surrealist mouvement, the rise of nationalism, and Americans in Paris. Taught in French.

W 7-8:45 PM For more information, contact Angela Elsey x 9-2894

angela_elsey@MACMAIL.ucsc.edu

Revised 7/23/04.