Electr* Engineering

[Norman Jaffe]

Hi Kevin: 
Yup. I haven't heard anything about Gana for decades, but Chris is on Facebook... I graduated in 1977... you'll probably also remember Rick Hobson, Jerry Barenholtz, Tom Calvert and Nick Cercone... 
For those not from SFU - https://www.sfu.ca/computing/about/history.html 

From: "Kevin McQuiggin" <mcquiggi at me.com> 
To: "myself" <turing at shaw.ca>, "cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2019 9:18:53 AM 
Subject: Re: Electr* Engineering 

Norman, I recall you! 

I was at SFU first as a high school student from 1975 then as an undergrad 1977-1981. 

Elma, Doreen, Ted Sterling, James Weinkam - you’ll remember them! 

I was a TA as well in the late 1970s and classes were small, especially upper level. 5-6 students per class and we’d TA one another based on our specialities. Mine was system software, OSes, a bit of hardware. It was a great “classic” university eduction, not the big machine it is now. 

Best wishes, 

Kevin 


Remember Gana and Chris Dewhurst? 

> On Aug 13, 2019, at 8:37 AM, Norman Jaffe via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: 
> 
> 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