History of Computing

As a student I worked as a tutor (student teaching assistant) for the experimental teaching project History as an Access to Computer Science (GAZZI). The purpose of the project was to give computer science students a better insight into how to write good papers and how to conduct larger research activities – areas that tend to be quite neglected in current German computer science (CS) curricula.

As the topic area of the project we had chosen historical developments in the fields of computer science and software development; both to open up an interesting field of exploration that is largely outside the scope of usual CS teachings and to provide the students with a better understanding of the history of their own field. The project ran for three years, from Summer 1998 to Spring 2001.

Note that all texts and web sites mentioned on this page are written in German. The GAZZI website is now defunct, hence the reports of the project and the courses given are no longer online.

Texts

The final report of the project:

An informal introduction to the goals and motivations of the project:

Both these texts have also been bundled in a technical report:

An exemplary term paper which both explains and, at the same time, demonstrates how good term papers are typically written:

Courses Given

Related Texts

Since the project was a teaching experiment, not a research project, we didn't do any historic research of own.

But as a undergraduate student I had written an excerpt about the development of the very first computers:

I also wrote some student papers regarding the history and philosophy of computing:


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