Computer Perspectives (50% option only)

Lecturers: Mr N. Bailey, Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes, Professor R.M. Needham and Professor A.J.R.G. Milner

No. of lectures: 4

Aims

In this course four lecturers cover four different aspects of Computer Science. The principal aim is to give insight (much of it first-hand) into various triumphs and failures over the years.

Lectures

• Software quality. Differences between programming to solve problems set as course work and programming for a living. Clients and their requirements. Design, specification and management. Ethical considerations. Waterfall diagrams, test procedures, monitoring progress. Metrics.

• The story of the computer. An illustrated history of the computer from the ENIAC and EDSAC of the 1940s to the Personal Computers of the present day. The development of processors, memory technology, disc drives and user interfaces.

• Design choices and outcomes. A look at the Grapevine messaging system.

• What does the global computer compute? We and our computers are all connected, forming a global computer. It has no predefined task; but how does it behave? Computer Science has to be enough of a science to understand this organism, which is just as complex as (for example) an ecology. What sort of theory can help?

Objectives

At the end of the course students should have some appreciation of the difficulties that may be encountered when working on a computing project and understand how these difficulties might be anticipated and managed.