Bill Gates and Steve Jobs might have made it fashionable to be in the technology business and inspired a new generation of tech entrepreneurs, but Computer Science was not regarded as discipline that required a specific school to teach until recently.

Back in the 70s, you wouldn’t say that “I have a degree in Computer Science.” A much closer reality would be “l took courses that were compsci-related in the math, engineering, physics departments.”  On most university campuses, CS grew out of mathematics or engineering departments.

Now that a few of our dear interns at Microsoft are about to embark on their university life come August, I start to wonder, when was the first Computer Science degree first introduced in Singapore and how has it evolved?

Here’s a slice of history from Singapore:

 

 

The first university to introduce a computer science related degree is the National University of Singapore. The School of Computing originated from the time before Singapore University and Nanyang University merged to form NUS. Back then it was known as the Department of Computer Science.

After the merger in 1980, The department became the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (DISCS) within the National University of Singapore. It became a fully fledged faculty—the School of Computing—on 1 July 1998, comprising the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Information Systems.

 

The School has about 2,000 students and it’s comp sci department offers 4 degree programs and interesting research programs such as the Turing Program (named after Alan M. Turing who provided the first model of algorithm and computation – the Universal Turing Machine-that allowed us to analyse what a computer can and cannot do) and the von Neumann program (named after John von Neumann who created the von Neumann architecture -that became the standard of computer architecture)  !

The rise of tech entrepreneurship and growth of “hacker culture” is also very prominent amongst NUS SoC students. NUS Hackers has been organising many talks and weekly meetings called Friday “Hacks” that include one or two technical talks, followed by a hacking session.

 

 

 
The four-year direct honours programmes provides a broad-based education as well as specialisations in areas such as Intelligent Systems, Computer and Communication Networks, Computer Vision and Graphics, Information Systems, Embedded Systems, and Software Engineering.

 

 
The youngest university to offer a Computing School is the Singapore Management University in year 2000. Although it’s not exactly Computer Science, The School of Information Systems (SIS) was formed with the aid of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) when SMU and CMU forged a four-year strategic partnership intended to use the expertise of the CMU faculty in the School’s initial establishment.

The school has a strong emphasis on pursuing entrepreneurship, with several companies starting up and tying up IT and business heavily. Of course, our very own DPE team has SMU-Carnegie alumni (Mingfei – who used to be our Developer Evangelist but is now in Microsoft HQ!)

 

With Computer Science graduates such as  Larry Page and Sergey Brin and its dropouts such as Mark Zuckerberg glamourising the world with the multi million dollar businesses that have come out of their studies, its no surprise that the CS degree will only become more and more popular.

 

I wish I had did mine.

 

 

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