Bob Bridges wrote, in part: >Speaking as a computer geek with no talent whatever for the visual arts, I'm >curious: Why in the world would artsy folks back then (or even now) want a Computing Office? What did he do with it?
Ah, you're confused. "Arts" is aka "liberal arts", generally including creative arts, writing, philosophy, and humanities. The focus was text processing. His ARTS198 class had assignments like "Given a list of names: Phil Smith Bob Bridges etc., convert it to Smith, Phil Bridges, Bob and then sort it by last name (with no Alex de Vries or the like in the list). Again, these folks had never seen a computer other than on Star Trek. Even when I'd help in the 80s, they were mostly lost; I remember prompting: "So what would you do first?" "Ummm." "Maybe read the input file?" "Oh, ok, yeah, that makes sense." and so forth. A friend took the class in the 80s and for his term project, he'd take a list of teams and scores and it would generate headlines: "Tigers Claw Bears 6-2" and the like. Of course this all sounds very basic (BASIC? Hah!) to us, but it was a real learning experience for these kids. And for me when I took it! By the time I was helping later, I was writing VM mods in assembler, so had a bit more of a clue (I like to think, anyway). ...phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
