CS50: The Class They Can’t Wait to Take

Before there was CS50, there was ES110, and when I took it in 1956 the first few sessions were taught by Howard Aiken himself. I always knew I would be an engineer, and before Prof. Aiken turned it over to Peter Calingaert I understood what I had been born to do. That unparalleled grounding in programming and logic design prepared me to follow some of the graduate students (Al Hopkins, Ray Alonso, Jim Lincoln) to MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory to design a series of ultra-miniature spacecraft computers, of which the third model became the prototype Apollo Guidance Computer. To that extent, the Cold War was won in the old Harvard Computation Laboratory. How I'd love to come back and audit CS50 now (ideally, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "I took ES110 decades before CS50 was imagined"), but the few square feet to accommodate my presence are better dedicated to the young people today who will learn to use 21st-century tools to analyze problems and synthesize solutions of daunting complexity. In many different ways the information handling they will implement may help bring our threatened planet back from the brink of thermal catastrophe, and perhaps even increase understanding to help people realize that faith does not demand hatred and wanton destruction.

After ES110, and before CS50, in the late 1970s there were Nat Sci 110, taught in the fall term by William Bossert, and Appl Math 110, taught in the spring term by Harry Lewis. Nat Sci 110 attracted 500-700 students and taught us how to program in PPL, a language supposed to have been implemented only at Harvard and at the Naval Observatory. It had some elements of BASIC and a lot of add-ons to make it very easy to manipulate data structures. It progressed at a steady, leisurely pace and Professor Bossert kept it entertaining. (I remember it fondly, not just because I was a Nat Sci sectionleader for two years, but because it was the site of my only academic speed victory: I was the first student to complete the midterm (12 minutes of an allotted 60) and the final exam (86 minutes of an allotted 180) and aced both. AM 110, alas, was not so easy: Professor Lewis moved briskly along as he taught us how to program in assembly language for a PDP-11/70 and then in LISP, and we ended with each student writing a LISP interpreter. Industry wanted computer programmers; the top student in the class ahead of me was reputedly offered a job at graduation with the handsome and almost unimaginable salary for a 22-year-old of $60,000 -- this was at a time when one year's Harvard tuition was about $10,000.

I hope the joy of playing with computers will not derail too many Harvard students from their serious studies. I think we must distinguish between Computer literacy, which all Harvard graduates should have for living in the 21st century, and computer science that offers jobs and fast money.With the great leaps in computer knowledge made by 5 - year olds and fifth graders, computer literacy should be expected--perhaps even of college freshman, like readn, riten, and rithmetic.