From a Black Art to a School Subject: Computing Education's Search for Status

Abstract

Computing education, in the sense we know it today, was born in the first half of the 1950s with the advent of mass-produced storedprogram computers [15]. Programming, using a vocabulary of a few dozen machine language commands in octal code, was not considered especially time-consuming to learn: In the first conference on training personnel for the computing machine field in 1954, the spokesperson for Remington Rand stated that "one manufacturer indicated that programmers may be trained in two weeks, while another requires twelve", depending on the computer and problem types [4]. After the birth of high-level languages, a 1960 conference of university computing center directors stated that programming is "now simple enough so that an undergraduate . . . can begin to use a particular machine after a few hours of instruction" [12].