Topics for Term Papers, Newsletter Articles or Wiki Entries

Famous Figures

• Augusta DeMorgan - Boolean Algebra
• Charles Babbage
• Alan Turing
• John Von Neumann
• William B. Schockley
• Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
• Grace Murray Hopper - mathematician & US Navy admiral
• Robert N. Noyce - invented integrated circuit
• Donald E. Knuth
• Augusta Ada Byron - daugher of Lord Byron the poet; many consider her the first computer programmer since she worked with Babbage and his "computer"
• The Women of the Eniac - Kathleen McNulty, Frances Bilas, Betty Jean Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder, Ruth Lictermann & Marlyn Wescoff
• Michael Dell - CEO & founder of Dell
• Pierre Omidyar - founder of eBay
• Jeffrey Bezos - co-founder of Amazon.com
• David Filo - co-founder of Yahoo
• Jerry Yang - co-founder of Yahoo
• Sergey Brin - co-founder of Google
• Larry Page - co-founder of Google
• Eric Schmidt - Google CEO
• Paul Allen - Microsoft co-founder
• Bill Gates - Microsoft co-founder
• Steve Jobs - Apple co-founder
• Steve Wazniak - Apple co-founder
• William Joy - Sun Microsystems co-founder
• Gary Kildall - true founder of the PC revolution & father of PC operating system
• Robert W. Bemer - inventor of ASCII code & first to warn about Y2K Crisis
• Vinton Cerf - Internet pioneer, UCLA grad student that helped Prof Len Kreinock invent the Internet
• Len Kreinock - Internet pioneer
• Steve Crocker - Internet pioneer, UCLA grad student that helped Prof Len Kreinock invent the Internet

• a list at Google
• machine languages
• Assembly languages
• FORTRAN 1957
• LISP 1960
• COBOL 1960
• ALGOL 60 1960
• APL 1962
• Simula 1967
• BASIC 1967
• Pascal 1971
• C 1978
• SmallTalk 1980
• Ada 1980
• C++ 1983
• Visual Basic
• Java
• XML
• Python

• the Turing Machine
• artificial intelligence
• encryption
• the programming & technology behind a search engine
• Linux
• Berkeley Unix (BSD)
• GNU & General Public License
• Pascaline - the first mechanical calculator by Blaise Pascal 1600's
• Differential Analyzer - mechanical computer by Vannevar Bush 1932
• Z3 - electromechanical relay-based computer destroyed by Allied bombers in 1941
• ABC - first electronic digital computer 1942
• Colossus - electronic digital computer used to crack German Enigma code in 1943
• ENIAC - first modern computer John Presper Eckert, Jr. & WIlliam Mauchly at Penn in 1946
• IBM 650 - first mass-produced computer 1953
• IBM 360 - first modern mainframe 1964
• CDC 6600 - prototype of supercomputer 1964
• Digital PDP-8 - first widely-available minicomputer 1965
• Xerox Alto - first modern personal computer 1973
• Illiac IV - first true supercomputer at Univ. of Illinois 1975
• MITS Altair - first widely-available personal computer 1975 (4 Kb memory)
• Apple II - first successful personal computer 1977 (up to 48 Kb)
• IBM PC - 1981
• Sun 1 - first successful workstation using UNIX & C 1982
• Apple Macintosh - mouse-driven, GUI 1984
• difference between microcomputer, workstation, minicomputer, mainframe, & supercomputer
• binary, octal, & hexadecimal numbering systems
• CAD/CAM - Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Aided Manufacturing
• CASE - Computer-Aided Software Engineering
• OOP/OOD - Object-Oriented Programming/Object-Oriented Design
• computer graphics animation
• parallel processing
• grid computing / worldcommunitygrid.org
• virtual reality
• ASCII & EBCDIC
• IEEE - Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers
• ACM - Association of Computing Machinery
• cybercrime court cases
• Domain Name System (DNS)
• TCP/IP
• Unix
• VisiCalc - an early spreadsheet application
• WordStar - an early word-processing application
• Oracle & its relational database technology
• Ethernet (IEEE 802.3)
• Apache web server (from 1995)
• MySQL
• LAMP vs .Net vs IBM's WebSphere vs Apple's WebObjects vs Sun's Java EE for web development

PowerPoint Tips

• Make sure that your slides focus your audience's attention, stimulate interest, reinforce key ideas,& illustrate hard-to-understand points. They are not meant to substitute for audience interaction, contain too much detail, contain too many points or no points at all, or simply be read aloud instead of supplementing the presentation.
• Spend about 2 minutes per slide
• Use the title of a slide to state its key point
• Don't include more than 5 bullets with no more than 5 words per bullet. This is called the 5 x 5 guideline.
• Phrases and key words should be used rather than long, detailed sentences
• Use few capitalized words since they are hard to read (only first word of each bullet and proper nouns)
• Don't use montonous transition effects and don't mix too many transition effects
• Slides should be numbered to help the audience keep track with their printed copy of the slides
• Be consistent with color and style. Use a dark background with light text.
• Use a sans-serif font such as Arial or Verdana since they are easier to read from a computer or movie screen.
• Font size should be 24 points or larger.
• Use photos, tables, graphs, and video clips to break up the presentation but make sure each visual has a purpose.
• Don't use clip-art since it looks old-fashioned and juvenile.
• Use animation only in support of a complex process or topic.