gramster / college-notes

My notebooks from my B.Sc./B.Sc (Hons) degree at University of Cape Town, 1984-1986. May be of historical/curiosity interest to some.

college-notes

Notebooks from my B.Sc. (Hons) Comp Sci degree 1984-1986 @ University of Cape Town. I am putting these up here as they may be of historical interest to someone, to see what we studied nearly 4 decades back. E.g. the software engineering courses still advocate waterfall approaches. Some things have changed a lot, and some things have changed not so much. They also provide an interesting contrast in structure with similar courses in American schools.

Notes:

• to make these PDFs be a reasonable size I did some heavy image processing on the scans. That seems to have worked pretty well in most cases but there are some that have ended up not that great in terms of legibility that I will revisit at some point and try to improve.
• unlike the US, academic years in the southern hemisphere run from Jan to Dec. A Bachelor of Science degree is a 3 year degree, but you can do an extra year to get a 'Honours' degree, which is considered a post-graduate degree. Masters and Doctorate degrees (which I eventually did) were pure research, so the Honours degree would be the end of course work. Also unlike the US, you pick your major right from the start, and it is the focus of your degree. You have a little bit of wiggle room for other elective courses (such as the digital electronics courses I took).
• I initially started studying electrical engineering, in 1982 and 1983. This was during a state of emergency while South Africa was in the latter days of Apartheid. Between being frustrated by the courses focusing mostly on heavy current (while my interest was digital electronics), and being overly distracted by and involved in student political activities, I decided to abandon engineering and switch to computer science in 1984, which meant a return to 2nd year; I had enough relevant credits and programming knowledge to be able to skip CS1. I kept no notes from my engineering courses in 1982/83 but did later do the digital electronics courses that were offered as part of my CS degree; some of those notes are here. Key point being these are not full coverage.
• not all notes are complete. I ran out of energy in some courses, especially if they were less interesting to me or I wrote finals before my notes were up to date :-)
• many of these have numbers in the left margin. We would get photocopied handouts of the 'transparencies' (in those days you didn't use PowerPoint, which didn't exist - slides were hand-written on clear plastic sheets placed by hand on projectors). These transparency copies formed the basis of my notes, and those numbers are slide number references.
• as for hardware: in 1983, that was punch cards on a Sperry Univac mainframe. Around 1985, we got NCR Tower 32 minicomputers with Motorola 68000 CPUs running Unix System 7. I loved those machines. By the time I was doing my masters we had IBM PCs and Sun SparcStations.
• for my bachelors degree, I triple majored in mathematics, computer science and philosophy, although I dropped my philosophy major near the end (what can I say, I found contemporary French philosophy undigestible). The math courses are here too, but for some reason I did not keep any notes from philosophy courses. There are also some missing notebooks; for example, I did a 'Formal Semantics 2' course that covered denotational semantics and other topics but only have the notes from 'Formal Semantics 1', and I did a CS4 course that involved Hoare's CSP, but that isn't here. We did a CS2 or CS3 course on Software Metrics ('Software Science'), one on 'comparative programming languages' that delved into languages like Prolog, PL/1 and Lisp, and a CS3 course on compilers based on the Dragon book; no idea what happened to these either. There was a math course on PDEs. And there may be others I have forgotten; looking back at CS3 and CS4, my notes here definitely seem thin compared to CS2. So I estimate this is about 80% of the content from the three years (ignoring the missing philosophy courses, some of whose titles I remember - Philosophy Of Science, Logic, Hermeneutics, ...).
• Amazingly, there was no stats. That would be an unforgiveable omission today. I had to learn stats on my own years later.
• I have a child currently two years in to a CS major undergraduate degree at a good US school, and it boggles my mind how little of the field they seem to have to study in comparison with what we did (and at much greater financial cost), but maybe the next two years will surprise me. They did get to do a course in Corvid (crow) Behavior though ¯_(ツ)_/¯
• yes, we wrote in cursive back then.