[rescue] Small servers (was Re: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100)

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk>
>Date: 2008/05/06 Tue AM 09:45:52 CDT
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Small servers (was Re: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100)

>On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 08:44:56PM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
>> Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>[...]
>>> You can get a comp-sci degree without ever leaving Netbeans...
>> You can get a comp-sci degree without ever having touched a computer.
>
>That's because Computer Science is not a vocational qualification.
>
>A decent CS degree will have lots of hands-on work from the gate level up,
>of course.

I attended (but did not graduate from) a small liberal arts college in central PA about 25 years ago, and the BIG DEBATE among the COmp Sci faculty was if they were going to teach COBOL or not to kids majoring in Comp Sci. The debate focused on the *perception* of reducing the degree to a certificate from a vocational school if they did teach COBOL.

The counter argument was that without some grounding in commercial computer technologies, it was exceedingly difficult to get a job with your four year degree in Comp Sci. Back then, C, C++, and 68000 assembler were the main languages taught, with some BASIC for non-Comp Sci majors in the Intro classes. Java hadn't been invented yet, and people were over Pascal already in most situations (as I recall).

I tried to convince the department heads that it would make sense to offer COBOL, FORTRAN, and some mainframe topics as "seminars" outside the normal course work for those students interested (not graded, not required for graduation).

Lionel