3 ms·

CompE = Computer Engineering.

• hga 17y ago
  Ah, I see. MIT's EECS department was first just plain EE, so they rather naturally combined the two as computers came of age (there was much less division between the two in the '50s and early '60s). As of the '80s, it had the opinion that "no MIT EECS graduate should be completely at sea if he had to do some programming or had some weird electrical problem to deal with" as I said in another reply to this thread. There really aren't many if any EE disciplines today that have no programming component. The reverse isn't so true, but a whole lot of programmers/CS types will be faced with EE problems they should at least have some understanding of. Plus the abstractions are hardly opaque; a minimal understanding of EE will help a lot in understanding what's going on with the beasts we program, where they're going, etc. WRT to the former, at my 2001 job at Lucent we had the strangest transmission line problem on a big PC board. It wasn't fully diagnosed until the lead EE for it got really desperate and put his scope probes at every point he could, upon which he found the signal was messed up in middle of a line ... but not at the end (which he had of course already checked). I don't have to know too much EE to know I can't blame him for taking so long to find it.