The following changes in the CSC curriculum were approved through the College governance process and have taken effect as of January 2000.

»     The Mathematics Support Course requirements have been changed to include a second semester of Calculus (MAT 221) and a Statistics course (MAT 247).   MAT 303, Modern Algebra, will no longer be required, but may still be chosen as the fifth support course.   The new list of Support Courses, applicable to students entering the CSC major in January 2000 or later, is as follows:

PHL	325	Symbolic Logic	3 cr.
MAT	220	Calculus  I	4 cr.
MAT	221	Calculus  II	4 cr.
MAT	214	Discrete Structures	3 cr.
MAT	247	Statistics  I	3 cr.
MAT	___	___________________	3 cr.
	The unspecified Mathematics course may be chosen from MAT 303, 304A, 308, 316.

»     An additional prerequisite, MAT 220 (Calculus I), has been added to CSC 415, Analysis of Algorithms.   MAT 220 is already required of CSC Majors, so no new courses or credits are involved in this change.

»     The obsolete course CSC 520 Internship in Computer Science has been deleted from the Catalog.   During the next year, it will be replaced by a new course which will offer internship experiences that are more flexible and more in line with the current state of the computer field.   [This new internship is CSC 267, effective as of January 2003.]

    The following changes in the Computer Science Department's course offerings and in the Computer and Information Studies major curriculum took effect in September 1998.

»    There are now six two-course Options available to CSC majors. The three Options previously available have been redesigned and renamed, and three new Options added, so that majors now have a wider selection of advanced areas in which to develop a specialization.

»    Three new courses were added to the Computer Science Department's course offerings as of September 1998:

    CSC 190 is designed for those students (CSC majors or others) who feel the need for further preparation in problem-solving and analytical reasoning before embarking upon the Department's standard software sequence, CSC 201  - 202,  Algorithm Design & Implementation I & II.
    CSC 312 is the second course in the new Object-Oriented Methods Option, and CSC 445 is part of the new Parallel Computing Option.   Either course may also be used as a Computer Science major elective.

»    Three courses were deleted from the Department's offerings as of September 1998:   CSC 270 (Assembly Language) and the specialized course CSC 440 (Knowledge-Based Application Systems) and its accompanying Laboratory, CSC 441.   The content of CSC 270 is now treated in two other courses, CSC 271 (Introduction to Computer Systems) and CSC 295) (Computer Architecture and Organization).

»    Two CSC course numbers were changed.  The former CSC 385, Analysis of Algorithms, is now CSC 415, and the former CSC 394, Design and Analysis of Software Systems, is now CSC 265 [note: renumbered and retitled in Fall 2002 as CSC 266].

»     Adam Osborne, who introduced and marketed the first portable PC in 1981, died in India on March 18, 2003, after a ten-year battle with an organic brain disorder. The 23-pound Osborne-1 computer sold nearly 10,000 units a month during its first two years, generating an income of more than 68 million dollars. Bad business decisions and the premature announcement of a second-generation model led to the company's collapse in 1983, the same year in which competitor Compaq marketed its first portable computer. Osborne then founded a software company, which he left in 1990. When serious health problems developed in 1992, he moved to India to live with his sister, and spent his remaining years there.

»     Robotics pioneer and artificial intelligence researcher Charles Rosen died on December 8, 2002, at the age of 85.   In 1966, at the Stanford Research Institute, Rosen created "Shakey," the first robot capable of making decisions based on analysis of its surroundings. Shakey could navigate around corners and execute simple tasks such as moving an object around a room. Some of the software that ran the Mars Rover, and some of the navigation software found in Internet services today, had their origin in the programs written for Shakey.   After leaving SRI, Rosen was a co-founder of Machine Intelligence Corporation, which manufactured devices for monitoring the movement of industrial components along a conveyor belt.

»     Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, one of the most influential figures in both theoretical and practical computer science, died on Wednesday 7 August 2002 in Austin, Texas, after a lengthy battle with cancer. His book A Discipline of Programming (Prentice-Hall, 1976) was one of the first to treat computer programming as an intellectual discipline based on formal logic and subject to well-defined structural principles. His technical report Cooperating Sequential Processes (1965), which introduced the semaphore construct, had a profound influence on the development of modern multiprogramming operating systems. His "shortest path algorithm" for graph traversal had both theoretical significance and practical influence in the field of information storage and retrieval.
    Dr. Dijkstra was born in the Netherlands in 1930. He earned degrees in mathematics and theoretical physics from the University of Leyden and a doctorate in computing science from the University of Amsterdam. He worked as a computer programmer during the 1950s, and was a professor of Mathematics at Eindhoven University of Technology from 1962 to 1984. During the last ten of those years he was also a research fellow for the Burroughs Corporation. He then joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, from which he retired in 1999.

»     John Robinson Pierce, a pioneer in the electronics and satellite comunications fields, died on Tuesday 2 April 2002, at the age of 92. In 1948, while working at Bell Laboratories (at that time the research branch of AT&T), Pierce was asked to think of a name for a newly invented solid-state device that amplified electrical signals. He suggested "transistor," and the device which was subsequently used to develop everything from small radios to computer circuitry has been known by that term ever since. In 1954, Pierce promoted an idea first proposed by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in 1945: that of long-range communication via signals bounced off an orbiting object. The technique was realized six years later with the launch of the Echo satellite (actually a gigantic balloon). Pierce subsequently played an important role in the development of Telstar, the first active communications satellite, launched in 1962.
     In addition to his work in electronics and satellite communications, Pierce was a musician (he recorded some of the first synthesized music) and a science fiction writer (under the pen-name J. J. Coupling). After his retirement from Bell Labs in 1971 he returned to his alma mater CalTech and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a professor of engineering. Later he was a professor of music at Stanford University and wrote books on theories of sound and music.

»     A largely unheralded computer pioneer, Frances "Betty" Snyder Holberton, died on Saturday 8 December 2001 from the effects of diabetes and a stroke. She was 84 years old. In 1943 Mrs. Holberton was recruited by the U.S. Army as one of a team of six women to operate ENIAC, a top-secret digital electronic machine designed to speed up computations of ballistics trajectories. At that time, programming languages and software in the modern sense had not yet been thought of, and the computer's operation was governed by physically moving and reconnecting the computer's components in order to route data, and work was done by pressing switches, turning dials, etc. Mrs. Holberton and the other operators developed a systematic technique for controlling the machine's functions rapidly and efficiently. ENIAC's creators began to refer to the work of this team of women as "programming". But in spite of their genuinely revolutionary contributions, the women were classified as "subprofessionals" by the Army, and received no credit for their work. After World War II, Mrs. Holberton joined the group of engineers who were developing the first general-purpose computer, the UNIVAC. She was the first person to think of using a keyboard to control a computer's operation, rather than using dials and switches. But although she became one of the most influential software experts in the field, she found that her contributions were still downplayed or unheralded because she was a woman. Later, while working at the National Bureau of Standards, Mrs. Holberton served on the committee that developed standards for the FORTRAN language and the comittee that created the business-oriented COBOL language. She retired from the Bureau in 1983.

»     Dr. Michael Dertouzos, director of the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science for many years, died on Monday 27 August 2001 at the age of 64, after an illness of several months. He was buried in Athens, the city of his birth. Dr. Dertouzos was widely regarded as a visionary thinker for his ability to analyze and forecast technological trends and their impact on society. In 1968 he founded Computek Inc., which produced one of the earliest graphical display terminals, based on his own design. He was the primary force behind the establishment of what is now called the World Wide Web Consortium, which ensures that all providers of Web services use mutually compatible languages and communications protocols. Dr. Dertouzos was the author of eight books and numerous technical articles. His most recent book was The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us.

»     Dr. Claude Shannon, Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died on Saturday 24 February 2001 at the age of 84. Dr. Shannon, a distant relative of Thomas Edison, was considered the father of modern digital communications and information theory. Dr. Shannon worked for more than thirty years at Bell Laboratories before joining the MIT faculty. His paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," published in 1948, laid the foundations for the representation of information of all kinds---text, images, and sound---by means of bit patterns, and theorized that the information content of a message could be measured by the number of bits needed to transmit it. He also did significant work in the areas of robotics and cryptography.

»     On Sunday, December 10, 2000, a Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to electrical engineer and inventor Jack St. Clair Kilby. It was Kilby who, in the summer of 1958, invented the semiconductor integrated circuit, otherwise known as the microchip, and launched the modern era of microelectronics and microcomputers. Some six months later another scientist, Robert Noyce, independently developed the same device, and is generally recognized as the co-inventor of the chip. (Noyce died in 1990, ten years too early to share in the Nobel Prize, which is not awarded posthumously.) [See "Inventor of the microchip gets his due" by T. R. Reid, Boston Sunday Globe, December 10, 2000.]

»     CSC major Nicholas Giarratani received the Academic Excellence Award for Sophomores at the Salem State College Honors Program Convocation on March 22, 2000.

»     Dr. Timothy Evans, previously a Visiting Lecturer in the Computer Science Department, has joined the Department as a full-time Instructor for the 1999-2000 academic year.

»    With deep sadness we report the death, on Sunday, December 20, 1998, of Dr. Raymond J. Perry.   Dr. Perry came to Salem State College in 1970, charged with the responsibility of developing a computer curriculum at the College.   He taught the first computer courses offered by the College (taught off-campus, using borrowed equipment), was instrumental in persuading the College administration to establish a Computer Laboratory with on-campus facilities available to students, and continued to teach a variety of computer courses until his retirement from the College in 1981.   He will be missed by his many former colleagues and students.

»    Dr. Timothy Evans, a Visiting Lecturer in the Computer Science Department, was the recipient of a $750 grant in the first annual Teaching and Learning Summer Grant Program (1998) sponsored by The Council on Teaching and Learning.   His topic was "A Hypertext Learning Appliance for Students Enrolled in CSC 100: Computers and Their Uses."

»    In the Summer of 1998, Visiting Lecturer Catherine Jessamy-Babb received her doctorate degree from Berne University, St. Kitts-Nevis.   On a visit to Barbados in late October, Dr. Jessamy-Babb gave a talk to students at St. Bartholomew's School on the topic "Y2000: Being Prepared for the Technological Changes."

»     Japan hosted a year-long Internet Fair during calendar year 2001. Information was available at the Internet Fair web site, which is no longer active. On January 5, 2001, the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs issued a pair of postage stamps to publicize the Internet Fair.

»     Another advance in the miniaturization of computer circuitry was reported in the Boston Globe for Friday, July 16, 1999. (A more complete report appears in this week's issue of the journal Science.) A team of researchers at UCLA and Hewlett-Packard have constructed simple logic gates — the building blocks of all digital computers — not out of silicon but out of molecules of complex organic compounds known as rotaxanes. UCLA chemistry professor James Heath, the leader of the project, is quoted as saying that this advance has the potential of obtaining the computational power of 100 workstations in a unit the size of a grain of sand. But not right away. "I'm hopeful we can do it in about a decade."

»     An item from Business Week for June 21, 1999, reports that researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and elsewhere are working to develop hybrid biocomputers that combine living nerve cells with silicon circuits to create smarter computers.   So far, researchers have joined two neurons from leeches and linked them to a PC, which sent signals to each cell and correctly extracted the answer to a simple addition problem.   The program that links the neurons and the PC, dubbed "wetware," is based on chaos theory, using the results to tune the neurons and alter they way they comunicate.   William L. Ditto, who heads the project at Georgia Tech, says that it will be ten years or longer before biocomputers become commercially available.

    The above item and many similar news digests are available on Edupage, a service of the international non-profit association EDUCAUSE, "dedicated to transforming education through education technologies."

»     The New York Times for Monday, June 14, 1999, contains an article on the distinction between "worms" and "viruses" in computers: see "Illness Is Fast Becoming Apt Metaphor for Computers" by John Markoff. The article points out in passing that both of these terms first appeared twenty-five years ago in science fiction novels: the term "worm" was coined in Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975), while "virus" first appeared in a computer context in When Harlie Was One by David Gerrold (1972). (Note: This article and several related ones are posted on the New York Times web site, but you must be an on-line subscriber to access them.)

»     An article currently posted on Wired News describes new developments in quantum computing, which involves the storage and manipulation of bits on individual atoms.

»    On October 27, 1998, IBM announced the development of the world's fastest computer, "Pacific Blue."   This supercomputer, developed for the Department of Energy, is capable of performing 3.9 trillion operations per second, 15,000 times faster than the average PC.   It also has 80,000 times as much memory capacity as the typical PC.   "Pacific Blue" has sufficient computing power and speed to perform in a few hours complex calculations that would otherwise consume months of time. It will be used to run rapid simulations of nuclear bomb tests, in order to ensure the safety and reliability of the country's nuclear weapons stockpile. Other future applications could include weather prediction, aircraft design, and the design of new drugs for health care.

»    Dr. Jessamy-Babb reported attending a demonstration of recently developed computerized white boards for use in lectures and presentations. As material is written on the white board, it is simultaneously displayed on a computer screen, and can be accessed from remote sites as well as being saved on disk for later dissemination in electronic or print form. This greatly reduces or even eliminates the process of taking notes by hand, and also allows remote viewers to transmit questions and comments to which a presenter can respond in "real time".

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