I was recently reviewing the seven newsletters of the Computers And Teaching [CAT] project. I previously commented on an article that predicted the cottage industry of home working that we see around the world today. I kind of missed The Internet, because we were thinking of supercomputers and terminals in those days, but by 1975 our thinking had been changed by the appearance of hobbyist home computer kids. That’s another story.

Here are the seven Computers And Teaching newsletters from the project. [Read more…]

I just reviewed the seven archived newsletters of my Computers And Teaching [CAT] project, written in 1972 and 1973. During that time I led other graduate students, faculty and staff at Northwestern University and the Vogelback Computing Center (a big centralized supercomputer facility) in promoting online educational uses of the computer. There was no network to speak of in those days…computers were just beginning to be able to “dial up” and chat with each other, and the computer terminal was still remarkably new. I was a new faculty member, having just completed a PhD in Computer Science, and my mentors were Ben Mittman (that linked page includes a tribute from me in 2007) and Claude Mathis, who headed unique centers within the university.

I made some guesses about the “cottage industry” that access to computing might support in the future and a lot of them were right. Um, actually everything in my article is commonplace today… [Read more…]