Stanford or MIT or UWaterloo

Bah. I took community college courses in highschool and the basic bitch introduction C++ course at that community college had the students using linux in the lab. The second-rate university I ended up going to after highschool required CS students to learn either Vim or Emacs to pass one of the required introduction courses, and all assignments had to compile and run on linux otherwise the TAs would reject them.

As far as I've seen, basic linux skills are taught if not required in the CS programs of colleges of any reputation or stature.

On my first day at a frankly pretty shit Australian university, we had mandatory Linux and Solaris training. I managed to skip it because the IT guy turned his screen to me and said "What's this?" and I replied "Dunno, looks like Fedora Core", but anyone who couldn't do that sat through several hours of training on SSHing into things and using bash, after which they were expected to turn in assignments that would compile in a remote Solaris environment.

This story doesn't have any real point, except maybe to say that knowing your way around a shell is up to the arbitrary whims of your university's administration and lecturers.

And maybe it awakens them to the fact that there is more out there than the abstract "what i run at home" environments available.

Stanford ain’t gonna teach you Unix either. I think they at least teach git usage in the intro classes now, but certainly did not while was there. Wasn’t a CS major but took a number of classes.

The only class I took that touched on anything practical for the working world was “programming for scientists and engineers”, CME211 I think? And most people only took it because it counted for grad level math credits.

I was taught how to get around a UNIX box in CS 101 at a state school.

Purdue CS in the mid/late 1990s. All coursework, if it wasn’t handwritten on paper, was developed and submitted with your account on the department UNIX cluster.

I switched majors so didn’t have any freshman courses; I certainly hope they taught people how to use the system. You couldn’t pass a class, let alone graduate, without being able to use UNIX.

There were a few side benefits to this setup. First, it allowed you to use the Sun pizza boxes in the engineering admin building, which were insanely powerful (back then). Second, it meant you could use any computer lab on campus, because they all had terminal emulators installed. So while the average student waiting in line for an open Windows PC, you could go down the hall and sit down at a Mac in a lab that had maybe two other people in it. Third, you could submit all your print jobs to the service center in the basement of the math building, where they’d collated, staple, whatever you wanted and then put it in a mailbox for you to collect at your own convenience, rather than deal with the clown show at the printers in all the Windows computer labs.

Good times

Oh, hey, IU in the mid 1990s here. We were doing Scheme on DEC ULTRIX boxes. (Which is also how I ended up being an emacs user. Oh well. Nobody's perfect.)

Good times indeed!

I graduated in a third world country. We did have a course or two on Unix.

I went to a state school, 75% of the CS class used linux, 20% used OSX and maybe 5% used windows.