Computer Science 50th Anniversary

Computer science in 1974, you sat in McBryde a lot. There was a room that was the key punch room. And you waited in line to be able to type in your program. And then you waited in line and read it in the card reader than you waited around for three hours until print out came back. Dr. George Gorsline he was the first department head. And really he's the one that started the process of growing the department. The first course that you took in computer science was 2071, introduction to programming when Dr. Gorsline, he's our guy. The mainframe was the main computer that we had that was run by the computing center, separate entity from the department. And at that time the computing center was located in the back of Burruss Hall. The second transition then was to these terminal rooms that you had hardware terminals. And then the PCs came out in the early eighties. Mid-nineties, and into the mid-2000 is when wireless networks started to pop up. That's how the kind of technology evolved in the last 40 years. And I was lucky that I got to play a part in all of it. There have been so many transformations and and evolutions in the department over the years. It's hard to name just a few, obviously, in computer science we kind of follow and is as much as possible lead the technical transitions and evolutions that happen in our field. But we've also seen a lot of changes in the students. And because computer science used to be more and more narrowly focused, we spent a lo