How Did They Get to the Moon Without PowerPoint? Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari Department of Science Teaching Weizmann Institute of Science
[email protected] Keynote speech at the Finnish Computer Science Society, May, 2003. 1 Developing a Technology The invention of writing, however, was the invention of an entirely new Let me start with a description of one of my first technology.[3, p. 9] full-time jobs: There is something to be said for this definition: I developed a technology for data min- do you remember those old movies that show “typ- ing in order to consolidate enterprise- ing pools,” where rows and rows of people, usually customer relations. women, sat pecking away at keyboards all day? Since I held that job in the early 1970s, clearly I would not have described my work in this terminol- ogy! What I actually did was: I wrote a program that read the system log, computed usage of CPU time and printed reports so that the users could be billed. My point in this talk is that hi-tech in general and computer science in particular did not begin in the 1990s, but that we have been doing it for decades. I believe that today’s students are being fed a lot of marketing propaganda to the contrary, and that they Well, things haven’t changed all that much! have completely lost a historical perspective of our discipline. I further believe that we have a respon- sibility as educators to downgrade the hype and to give our students a firm background in the scientific and engineering principles of computer science.