Capstone Articles

This is the list of articles that I use (or have used) when teaching our CS capstone course. These papers chronicle the development of the field of computing and computer science. At the end of the semester, I do some "special topics" and then I like to end with a short story by Isaac Asimov (pertinent for all CS majors) and a wonderful paper on how to write scientifically.

Early Computing

• Knuth, D.E., 1972. "Ancient babylonian algorithms." Communications of the ACM, 15(7), pp.671-677.
• Lovelace, Ada A. 1842. "Notes on 'Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, by LF Menabrea'".

World War II: Electronic Pioneers

• Raúl Rojas. 1997. "Konrad Zuse's Legacy: The Architecture of the Z1 and Z3". IEEE Ann. Hist. Comput. 19, 2 (April 1997), 5-16
• Arthur W. Burks, Herman H. Goldstine, and John von Neumann. 1947. "Preliminary discussion of the logical design of an electronic computing instrument." (Second Edition)

Early Programming Languages

• Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo. 1976. "The Early Development of Programming Languages." Computer Science Department, Stanford University.

The Software Crisis

• C. A. R. Hoare. 1981. "The Emperor's Old Clothes." Commun. ACM 24, 2 (February 1981), 75-83
• Edsger W. Dijkstra. 1972. "The Humble Programmer." Commun. ACM 15, 10 (October 1972), 859-866

Responses to the Software Crisis

• Frederick Brooks. 1987. "No silver bullet - essence and accident in software engineering." IEEE Computer 20, p. 10-18.
• Naur, P. and Randell, B., 1969. Software engineering: Report of a conference sponsored by the nato science committee, garmisch, germany, 7th-11th october 1968.
• John Backus. 1978. "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?: a functional style and its algebra of programs." Commun. ACM 21, 8 (August 1978), p. 613-641.
• C. A. R. Hoare. 1969. "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming." Communications of the ACM, Vol. 12, No. 10. p. 576-583.

Rise of Personal Computers

• Kay, A.C., 1977. "Microelectronics and the personal computer." Scientific American, 237(3), pp.230-245.

Special Topics: Artificial Intelligence

• J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, C. E. Shannon. "A proposal for the dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence" , August 1955.
• Bender, E.M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A. and Shmitchell, S., 2021, March. "On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?" In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623).
• Brin, S. and Page, L., 1998. "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine." Computer networks and ISDN systems, 30(1-7), pp.107-117.

Special Topics: Security

• Golden, Frederic. "Superzapping in Computer Land". TIME Magazine. (January 1981)
• Thompson, Ken. 1984. "Reflections on Trusting Trust". Commun. ACM 27, 8 (August 1984).

Miscellaneous Readings

• Asimov, Isaac. "Profession". Nine Tomorrows. Doubleday (1959).
• Gopen, George D., and Judith A. Swan. "The science of scientific writing." American Scientist 78.6 (1990): 550-558.