MS-DOS is maybe the ugliest operating system I ever had the displeasure of using.
There's very little to learn from operating system design point of view in there, and better sources are available under more permissive licenses -- ie open source licenses.
I have (had?) salivary gland cancer. Diagnosed before 30 at a IVa stage. I had surgery, radio and chemo. After that, the 5-years survival rate is 1 in 10. And if you do make it, your quality if life is significantly impacted and you're permanently disfigured - radical neck surgery ain't pretty.
I have a background in academia and despite the fact that I like to tell myself that I am some unique snowflake and that I'll make it, I know where I stand. No doctor told me, but I went to PubMed myself.
Am I pleased to know that? Not sure. And it kind of bothers me the fact that all my daily careful efforts will all boil down pretty soon to an event that is as dumb as the outcome of rolling a dice.
You should never submit any work to a conference or journal you do not know and follow beforehand.
To be more explicit: a good rule of thumb is that if you are not familiar with the publications of at least some of the committee or, if you were asked to suggest reviewers for you research out of the scientific committee members, you'd be hard pressed to name a few, you should not submit anything.
Your students should know that. If none explained something similar to the above, then you should have.
As you get older, I find I only follow 1-2 quality publications. I often get invited to dubious / shady conferences and I just hit the spam button. All of my peers do the same.
My grand mother in the second half of the 80s and in the early 90s taught CS - mostly algorithms and math related issues in CS - with a lot of programming in Pascal (Borlad Turbo Pascal) in a Jewish high school in... Italy.
She had a huge influence on me and I will forever be proud of her.