Rick -- My recollection -- and I think I may have something which documents it -- is that IBM was teaching its customers<div>about computers earlier than the mid-70s. I think mid-60s is a closer estimate. I presume it was all in the service of </div>
<div>sales, but I think Ken Powell was involved.</div><div><br></div><div>Fred - I'm curious whether you can recall any discussion with the IBM execs about issues other than the mechanics of computers</div><div>and assembler programming. For example, were the issues of what is computable, or what an algorithm is, or in what directions </div>
<div>languages and compilers might evolve, ever raised? By your estimate this would have been after FORTRAN had</div><div>been delivered and met with some success, but before COBOL and Algol 60 were under way, so I'm curious whether that would have </div>
<div>entered into the discussions. (And I fully realize that this was A Long time ago....)</div><div><br></div><div> Peter </div><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Rick Dill <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rdill@cyburban.com">rdill@cyburban.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<p>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) </p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Rick .. who spent 45 years in IBM .. mostly, but not all
technology</p>
<p>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 computers (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.<br>
</p><div class="im">
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 1/5/2012 5:46 PM, <a href="mailto:JHMcCarthy@aol.com" target="_blank">JHMcCarthy@aol.com</a> wrote:
</div><blockquote type="cite">
<font color="#000000" face="Arial"><div class="im">
<div>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 </div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" lang="0">Justin (Jud) McCarthy<br>
251 SW 9th Ave<br>
Boca Raton, FL 33486<br>
Home <a href="tel:%28561%29391-1422" value="+15613911422" target="_blank">(561)391-1422</a> Cell: <a href="tel:%28561%29504-7048" value="+15615047048" target="_blank">(561)504-7048</a></font></div>
</div><div> [snip]</div>
</font><br>
</blockquote>
[
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