13 Aug
2019
13 Aug
'19
8:37 a.m.
Kevin - which university did you go to?
I was in the first class at Simon Fraser University that started in Computing Science
(1974) rather than transferring in from another department... we often had TAs in one
class that were students in the next one, as they had taken the first class earlier...
From: "cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
To: "Adam Thornton" <athornton at gmail.com>, "cctalk"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2019 7:50:15 AM
Subject: Re: Electr* Engineering
In my school in Canada, the computing science program started about 1974 and grew out of
the math department, but when it was formalized as a department in 1976-77 the university
wisely placed it in a new ?Interdisciplinary Studies? faculty and staffed the school with
people from mathematics, chemistry, physics, and some external engineering folks.
It worked out very well and the program was recognized shortly as one of the best in
Canada due to recognition of CS? interdisciplinary nature.
On Aug 12, 2019, at 11:05 PM, Adam Thornton via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
At Rice in the early 90s the department was "Electrical and Computer
Engineering" if my hazy memory serves.
The genealogy of Computer Science departments (and their curricula) (at least in the US)
is also weird and historically-contingent. Basically it seems to have been a tossup at any
given school whether it came out of the Electr[ical|onic] Engineering department, in which
case it was memories and logic gates and a bottom-up, hardware-focused curriculum, or out
of the Mathematics department, in which case it was algorithms and complexity analysis and
a software-focused curriculum.
Adam