XPost: alt.usage.english   
   From: mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere   
      
   kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:   
      
   > Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?=   wrote:   
   >   
   >> Funny how, in the early days (e.g. 1940s/50s/60s), many Comp Sci   
   >> disciplines started within electrical/electronic engineering departments.   
   >   
   > In the seventies and eighties there were two kinds of CS programs, the   
   > ones that came out of EE departments and the ones that came out of math   
   > departments.  They were often dramatically different in their approach   
   > and it wasn't until the ACM curriculum of the mid-1980s that this really   
   > changed and some degree of uniformity appeared.   
      
   1964, UMass, a course called "computer programming" was offered.  The   
   instructor was seconded from industry, not regular faculty.  He   
   proposed to teach a math course in "numerical methods".  Most of the   
   class announced that they'd drop the course if he didn't teach how to   
   actually program a computer rather than a math subject.  His protests   
   that you couldn't write a useful program if you didn't understand   
   numerical methods were to no avail.   
      
   So he bit the bullet and taught us (some version of?) Fortran which we   
   happily tried out with punch cards on the school's IBM 1620.   
      
   I had no further encounters with computers until I got a chance to   
   dick around with BASIC on a friend's Apple ][ many years later.   
      
   --   
   Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)