Electr* Engineering

[Kevin McQuiggin]

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