Currently reading: Edinburgh Uni Computer Science 2h foundations course handouts from 1986/87. Even partway through the mathematical preliminaries chapter and I have a headache.
I am going to scan all of this and put online to share the joy
#computerscience #cs
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Ok, for people who want to study CS back when there was a lot less of it, I'm putting some of the notes up, starting with bits of first year CS1 & EE2 (skipped EE1 as I'd a- level physics).
@stevel interesting - I'm surprised how little changed by 1996 when I started that course.
@georgexcollins which editors did they foist on you? And what language? Pascal?
The maths course didn't seem to have changed since about 1800.
- One lecturer read it out
- one wrote it up on the whiteboard
- we wrote it down
- we were examined
That's it
I don't know when fourier transforms, eigenvectors or partial differential equations came about, but they were about the limit. And none of it was taught in an interesting way,
There are some really good online books about probability I'm happy to read -which is why I didn't bother to scan any maths stuff
EE2 taught C on BSD unix 4.2 on pdp+ vax, targeting 6809s and electronics. C lang looks a bit "younger" then.
- int is default return type...no need to state it.
- vars need to be declared at top of each function
- 'register' keyword? I really don't remember that.
https://github.com/steveloughran/edinburgh_cs/blob/main/1985-cs1/1985-ee2-c-programming-language.pdf
And alongside that, guide to the Queen Mary University "em" text editor, like "ed" only more usable, features of which went back into vi.
This is a line editor where to see what the file contents are you have to issue a p command to print the lines. It's a relic of the real teletype era. And if you launch vi as "ex" this document is still valid
Anyone who wants to try ex should print the doc, grab a vt220 font, make a terminal 80x24 full screen and try and do the homework of 150 word essay. I don't want to repeat that. Tried for 5 lines of the README and gave up
I added em (a contraction of: "Editor for Mortals" apparently) to MacPorts approximately one year and nine months ago now:
https://ports.macports.org/port/em/details/
Lamentably, George Coulouris had passed away by the time I had done so (and his obituary had not yet been published).
There's more information on its history as the first visual editor for UNIX which can be gleaned here: https://www.coulouris.net/cs_history/em_story/
Awesome to see some academic documentation related to it, albeit from a much later date than its inception.
@teajaygrey glad you like it, but consider this, bsd 4.2 shipped with vi and yet we were being told how to use the one which didn't paint the terminal with your file, just the line...though clearly (and I hadn't thought about that), even editing the current line was something a real TTY can't do
- Dept CS: ved editor done by them and/or Manchester uni
- Dept AI: micro emacs ((its lispy after all))
- EE dept: something an iteration behind what came with the OS
I had been accustomed to line editors long before I encountered vi and BSDs. I can't claim to use vi still (or derivatives, e.g. vim, nvi2 [which I wish were more prevalent given my second language is Japanese]) because I prefer it so much as: it's usually there. ;)
The SysOp/admin in me tends to prefer things which are low on consuming clockcycles and memory utilization, so I never cultivated much of a taste for emacs (and variants).
Perhaps my most despised editors were on (Open)VMS where I learned, the hard way, of DCL (DEC Command Language)'s awful implicit command completion (an anti-pattern AmigaDOS also had), so when I would type: "ls" it would invoke lse (Language Sensitive Editor) which took seconds (perhaps in excess of 10) to load. My first college (carleton.edu) also defaulted to some other in-line editor for their email client, which failed to line wrap correctly. On screen: lines would wrap, yet that was an illusion, and buffers would overflow if the characters exceeded some arbitrary amount (probably 256 characters? It was decades ago and I no longer remember precisely, so much as learning that lesson, very painfully and learning to be mindful of CR/LF to make sure the buffers were written out rather than overflowing after paragraphs of text had been lost into the void).
I do not think I ever encountered em when it was in active use, and I lament that I only was able to create a MacPort for it after its author's passing. Truly tragic timing.
The invention of the video terminal is one of those things in computing history that everybody takes for granted now, but was actually hugely important.
Like, the usefulness of a video terminal was obvious even back then, but it took quite a lot of engineering to make hardware capable of actually doing it. Drawing text on a screen is really hard compared to just sending characters to a typewriter.
+ CS3 year form during team project, where I am allowed to work at night/weekends (no laptops, remote access only from terminals at the halls of residence & a few other places).
- no sleeping in the building
- no possession of camping equipment in the building
The only reason they would explicit restrict the carrying of camping equipment is they must have caught enough people trying to sleep there that they needed to ban it.
I spent some time at MIT media lab and the stories of what postgrads got up to there is even worse.
https://github.com/steveloughran/edinburgh_cs/blob/main/1987-cs3/1988-cs3-after-hours.jpg
