An introductory course in computer programming (1965)

I liked this part: &quot;the student is treated in no way differently from the faculty or staff in the nature of...contact with the processing capacity of the computer.&quot; Says a lot about the hierarchy of the period (as does the use of &quot;his contact&quot; in the original...)<p>This is ironic to me because I have seen that the other way from usual: in 1984 I was a TA at Stanford for a class whose students were grad students and faculty in the philosophy department (I was part of a team at PARC developing a new programming language relevant to the work at the newly formed CSLI). Most of them had never touched a computer before. Some of the faculty didn&#x27;t enjoy being &quot;students&quot; again, and many didn&#x27;t do the homework.<p>And a couple of years before I was taking a humanities class at MIT. A special section of 6.001 (introduction to programming, taught in Scheme) was being offered to the faculty. He asked me for help with the homework.<p>This was at a time when I think the majority of MIT undergraduates arrived without having used a computer more powerful than a pocket calculator.

I find this funny:<p><i>Flow charts are not a programming language, largely because they are two dimensional and pictorial, and there is no convenient way of reading them into the computer. This situation will almost certainly change, since graphical input devices using large cathode ray tubes are now being developed for computers; but for the present, flow charts are limited to expressing algorithms.</i>

This is fantastic. So much has not changed in the programming curriculum at universities in 50 years - just the language and few more complementary classes.

One had to wait a few more years to have rudimentary i&#x2F;o standardized in Algol.

It&#x27;s so strange to see that not much have been changed in the computer programming course in college since 1965