History of Computing

19588

This is a special course that I will be giving during this semester for students from Stanford University and FU Berlin. Students of the FU Berlin can get the "Schein" for Gesellschaftliche Aspekte der Informatik and students of the Stanford University will get 2 hours of credit. The lectures will be in English and ocasionally in German. We will record some lectures and will send them through the Internet.

Enrollment

There is a limited number of places available for this course. Send me an e-mail if you want to take part (rojas@inf.fu-berlin.de). Places will be awarded on a first come first served basis.

Date

Mon 14:15-16:00, starting on 2001-04-23

Place

Takustraße 9, SR 049

The course will give the students a panoramic view of the history of computing in the 20th century. Ideally, students who successfully complete this course will improve their understanding of how the field of computing developed and matured. They will be expected to be aware of the principal people, places, and events that shaped the industry. Such students will appreciate the broad sweep of this branch of history and be able to relate it to the social and scientific changes that were taking place during the same time frames.

This is a presentation based course. Every student will work on a specific project and will write an essay about a specific machine or event in the history of computing. The essay will be put on a web site, together with the transcript of each lecture.

Topics

A Topic will be covered in a weekly 90 minutes presentation. The presentations will also be available in the Internet. As soon as they are held, you can use a link below.

Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine
The Harvard Mark I and the ENIAC written material
Konrad Zuse's computers in Germany (only audio and video) written material
Colossus and code breaking in the UK (only audio and video)
The first programming languages: Plankalkül and FORTRAN written material
The age of the mainframe: IBM and the seven dwarfs written material
The 1970s and the minicomputer revolution written material

The personal computer: Apple and IBM written material
The ARPANET and the Internet (sorry, bad audio quality due to mic problems) written material
The making of the World Wide Web written material
The future of computing: 2000-2010 PPT presentation
Final discussion

Literatur

Raul Rojas, Ulf Hashagen (eds), The First Computers, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000.
Raul Rojas (ed.), Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History, Fitzroy Deaborn, NY, 2001.

Other books for each topic will be specified during the course.

Miscellaneous

2001-05-18 Happy Birthday to Stanford Berlin: Stanford Party

Letzte Änderung am 20. Juli 2001 (Gerald Friedland)