Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!oddjob!uwvax!umn-d-ub!umn-cs!ns!ddb
From: ddb@ns.ns.com (David Dyer-Bennet)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: CS with Laboratories
Summary: Depends on the schools...
Message-ID: <350@ns.ns.com>
Date: 7 Jul 88 22:54:41 GMT
References: <1018@ndsuvax.UUCP> <82400008@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Network Systems Corp. Mpls MN
Lines: 21

In article <82400008@p.cs.uiuc.edu>, gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
> 
> I disagree with the base note writer.  Think back a mere 15 years --
> how was computer science taught at the major schools?  People
> submitted card decks to computer operators and picked up their
> printouts 1/2 an hour later.  If you were a grad student at an
> exceptional department, you could interact with the front panel of a
> PDP-11.
  Well, I wasn't at a major school, but when I was in college starting
in '72, students had access to an interactive timesharing system and
several "workstations", as well as a standalone "batch" system and
remote batch on a big (cdc 6600) system.  Most of the work was, of course,
done on the timesharing system and the workstations.  I also got to hack
hardware on several pdp 8's.  This was as an undergraduate, at a school with
no gradute program or computer science department (specifically, Carleton
College in Northfield, MN).  I'm editing out the additional opportunities
available to me from working for the computer lab sometimes, since they
didn't apply to everybody.
  If the "major schools" were as bad as you say, I guess I have one
more reason to be thankful for having been to a minor one.  (I'd never
recommend to anybody that they go to a big school for undergraduate
education.)