[TheForge] Re: OT - Telcom stuff

[Michael H. Murphy]

Don't forget Charles Babbage.

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the
machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able
rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such
a question."

This is the type of stuff I get a lot of as a support tech.

Murf

> -----Original Message-----
> From: theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:theforge-
> bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
> Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 8:51 PM
> To: theforge at mailman.qth.net
> Subject: [TheForge] Re: OT - Telcom stuff
> 
> 
> > 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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