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 ..!uunet!pdn!reggie Mail stop LF-207 Phone: (813) 530-2376 P.O. Box 2826 NOTE: codas<--->pdn will be gone soon Largo, FL 34649-2826