4 ms·
I strongly agree that we should be teaching a history of computing in CS/CE programs. I fondly remember my intro to computing systems class taught by a greybear
by thescriptkiddie 6y ago
I strongly agree that we should be teaching a history of computing in CS/CE programs. I fondly remember my intro to computing systems class taught by a greybeard who spent the entire first lecture going over history and then told us to learn emacs or vim for homework.
- flenserboy 6y agoHave a term where students, familiar with modern programming, have to deal with programming on older (80s?) machines (on VMs, at least). Not only will it force them to deal with constraints they would otherwise be unaware of, they will appreciate what they have available to them today much, much more.
- filoleg 6y agoPeople underestimate how useful it would be, despite it not being "directly applicable". If I had to pick one class that I would call fundamental to my understanding of CS, it would be CS2110 (Computer Organization and Programming) from Georgia Tech. It started off with building stuff using logic gates, like APUs. Then it moved onto other stuff. It all culminated into building your own simplistic CPU pipeline (in an emulator) and making a small game for Gameboy Advance. Dealing with hardware limitations of that handheld console, as well as learning some interesting tricks the devs had to employ for it to add stuff like parallax backgrounds, felt eye-opening.