10: The Academic Computer
It was inevitable that the computer invade, or perhaps “infiltrate” is the better word, our education system. Mark I and ENIAC were university-born and -bred, and early research work was done by many institutions using computers. A logical development was to teach formal courses in using the computer. While application of the machine in mathematical and scientific work came first, its application to business and to the training of executives for such use of the computer was soon recognized. As an example, one of two computers installed by U.C.L.A. in 1957 was for use exclusively in training engineering executives as well as undergraduates in engineering economy.
Early courses were aimed at those already in industry, in an attempt to catch them up with the technology of computer-oriented systems in business and science. As special courses, many of these carried a high tuition fee. Next came the teaching of professors and deans of engineering institutions in techniques of computer education for undergraduates. Today the computer is being taught to many students in many schools. New York University has a $3 million computer at its Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, being used by students in basic and applied research on projects ranging from the design of bridges to the analysis of voting patterns in Congress.
M.I.T. recently added a digital computer to teach its students the operation of electronic data-processing equipment. Another computer is used in more sophisticated work including speech analysis, study of bioelectrical signals, and the simulation of automata as in the “Hand” project. At the computing center of the University of Michigan a second generation of computers is being installed. Students in some one hundred different courses use these computers, programming them with a language developed at the University and called MAD, for Michigan Algorithm Decoder. These are typical examples of perhaps two hundred schools using computers.
That knowledge of computer techniques is essential for the engineering graduate is evident in the fact that of a recent class of such students at Purdue, 1,600 used the computer during the term. Less known is the integration of computer courses in secondary education. The Royal McBee Corporation teaches a special course on the computer to youngsters at Staples High in Westport, Connecticut. At the end of the first four-week session it was found that the students, fifteen to seventeen years old, had learned faster than adults. At New York’s St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic High School, 400 girls participated in a similar project conducted by Royal McBee. Other high schools are following suit, and computers are expected to appear in significant numbers in high schools before the end of 1962. Textbooks on computers, written for high-school students, are available. As an example of the ability of young people in this field, David Malin of Walter Johnson High School in Rockville, Maryland, read his own paper on the use of computers to simulate human thought processes to science experts attending the 1961 Eastern Joint Computer Conference held in Washington, D.C.
The use of the computer in the classroom encompasses not only colleges and high schools, but extends even to prisons. Twenty inmates of a Pennsylvania state institution attended a pilot program teaching computer techniques with a UNIVAC machine.
Datamation
Seventeen-year-old David Malin who presented a paper on computers at the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in 1961.
The United States is not alone in placing importance on the computer in schools. Our Department of Commerce has published details of Russian work in this direction, noting that it began in 1955 and places high priority on the training of specialists in computer research, machine translation, automation, and so on. The Department of Commerce feels that these courses, taught at the graduate, undergraduate, and even high-school level, are of high quality.