Saturday, October 27, 2012

A propos of the debate on IT/Computer Science ...

Finally thanks are due to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Thirty years ago they commissioned the building of the BBC Microcomputer to support the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Designed for school children, the manuals for this computer started with over 500 pages devoted to computer programming (from scratch) using BBC Basic. There were less than 50 pages at the very end of the second volume on how to use the computer as a word processor. BBC BASIC was a sophisticated, structured interpretive programming language that could create coloured graphics using simple commands, allowed recursive functions (one that can call themselves) and much else. ... All the graphics in this book were produced on [a BBC computer] with just ... four standard programs.
Daniel Dorling, "The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure", Chichester:Wiley (emphasis mine)
 

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