[SPG_Active_Members] Re: [1401_interest] Fwd: [1401_founders] First compu...

[Burtgrad at aol.com]

Have any of you checked with Ralph Eikenberry who was in charge  of IBM 
Education during the 1960s? He was on the unbundling task force (for  
education) in 1069 and may know some of the history.
 
Burt Grad
 
 
In a message dated 1/6/2012 2:49:44 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
capek at ieee.org writes:

Rick --  My recollection -- and I think I may have something which 
documents it -- is  that IBM was teaching its customers  
about computers earlier than the mid-70s.   I think mid-60s is a  closer 
estimate.  I presume it was all in the service of 
sales, but I think Ken Powell was involved.


Fred - I'm curious whether you can recall any discussion with the IBM  
execs about issues other than the mechanics of computers
and assembler programming.  For example, were the issues of what is  
computable, or what an algorithm is, or in what directions 
languages and compilers might evolve, ever raised?    By your  estimate 
this would have been after FORTRAN had
been delivered and met with some success, but before COBOL and Algol 60  
were under way, so I'm curious whether that would have 
entered into the discussions.   (And I fully realize that this was A  Long 
time ago....)


Peter 


On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Rick Dill <_rdill at cyburban.com_ 
(mailto:rdill at cyburban.com) > wrote:


On the business end, the first "computer literacy" courses I know of were  
led by Ken Powell, who worked for IBM Education.  Ken was very much a  
self-starter.  In the mid 1970's he put together a team to teach  computer 
literacy to IBM executives.  This was before there was a real  IBM PC project.  He 
engaged any executive for whatever time he could  get (from a couple of 
hours to multiple days)   
It started with simple exercises .. writing instructions on paper and  
handing them around to illustrate the concepts of a program .. and went on  from 
there.  IBM execs at the time knew about selling computers, but  had no 
clue about how they worked.  It ended up (if there was time)  programming a 
KIM.  I think it helped soften up management to allow the  PC to proceed.
I was aware of this because the the other three on the team worked for me  
and I gave them time from their research to do it.  At that time, my  
department focus was on display technology, but we had  number of  interesting 
computer projects including a WYSIG display that could produce a  full page of 
formatted text, far in advance of the LISA. 
Ken earlier put together a project to get "personal computers" into the  
hands of people at home and see what they did.  I signed up and he got  a few 
of us Sphere computers.  I couldn't get the memory in mine to  remember long 
enough to get much done, but others had better success. 
Rick ..   who spent 45 years in IBM .. mostly, but not all  technology 
p.s. my first computer literacy course came in the summer of 1954 when I  
was a summer student at IBM in Poughkeepsie.  At that time, the company  took 
its vacation together and the new employees and summer students spent  
three weeks in class learning about IBM.  R. K. Richards taught a  course on co
mputers (701 era) using the pre-prints from a book he was  writing.  That was 
an era when they handed out boolean minimization  problems to groups of 
people to see who could come up with the best  solution.



On 1/5/2012 5:46 PM, _JHMcCarthy at aol.com_ (mailto:JHMcCarthy at aol.com)  
wrote: 

 
Ron: I cannot personally attest to knowing any college level classes  
before 1982, but I am sending your inquiry to Dr Dave Bradley for his  input.   
Regards ----   Jud 
 
Justin (Jud) McCarthy
251 SW 9th  Ave
Boca Raton, FL 33486
Home _(561)391-1422_ (tel:(561)391-1422)  Cell: _(561)504-7048_ 
(tel:(561)504-7048) 

 [snip]


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