[SIGCIS-Members] Importance of history to practitioners

[Hansen Hsu]

I wasn’t lucky enough to have Patterson as my CS152 professor, unfortunately!

> On Nov 17, 2016, at 3:23 PM, William Aspray <William.Aspray at Colorado.EDU> wrote:
> 
> Dave Patterson used to be my boss when he was chairman of the board of Computing Research Association and I was executive director. We had several conversation about history, and it was clear that he and his colleague Randy Katz both had a serious appreciation for history. Dave made his graduate students read back in the computing literature much more extensively than many other advisors do, so as to give these students a historical sense of their discipline.
> 
> By the way, here at the University of Colorado Boulder we have a junior-level course in our information science department, which I teach, which covers both computing history and information history. It is an elective but counts towards the undergraduate degree in our department (which is a technically oriented degree with an orientation towards data science, machine learning, visualization, computational social science, network science, design, and human-computer interaction). The course fulfills a history requirement across all the departments in my college (College of Communication, Media, and Information). It looks as though the computer science department, which is in the college of engineering, will approve this course as an elective for its undergraduate majors.
> 
> Cordially, Bill