[TheForge] Re: OT - Telcom stuff

[Mike Spencer]

> I have seen the college curricula in "computer science".  It's a joke
> anymore....The heart of the theoretical CS curricula seems to have
> been torn out of several schools.  Talk to some kids about finite
> automata and they look at you as if you were trying to bugger them in
> the nostril.

I was embarrassed to discover, spring of 1993, that a CS senior about
to graduate with with good marks and with whom I was working just
then:

   thought that a single-CPU conventional computer that was running
   several programs at once was literally doing two things at once.
   I.e he had no concept that there was only one instruction in the
   instruction register at a time.

   had never heard of Mozart.

Nobody should get a CS degree without having read Norbert Weiner,
W. Ross Ashby, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch and others who were in
on the early years of thinking about machine computation, who thought
deeply and wrote readable stuff about their thoughts.  (I don't have a
CS degree so I may be excused if I omitted to mention someone equally
important by name.)

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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