Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!cbmvax!uunet!pdn!reggie
From: reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: CS with Laboratories
Message-ID: <3646@pdn.UUCP>
Date: 6 Jul 88 11:21:42 GMT
References: <1018@ndsuvax.UUCP> <82400008@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Paradyne Corporation,   Largo FL
Lines: 26

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.  These schools still produced good programmers.

 
    Yes, they did.  I never touched a crt as an undergraduate.  When many
years later I started teaching I was not impressed with the PC trend.  But
I must say that it does accomplish one important advancement.  That is
the availability factor.  How many runs did the average student get on the
card reader-input/line printer-output system in a good day?   And God forbid
the machine crashed.  Undergrads do not need to be working with the leading
edge technology.  They just need available computing resources to meet their
needs.



-- 
George W. Leach					Paradyne Corporation
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