Oral history interview with Louis Fein

Abstract

Fein discusses his involvement in establishing computer science as an academic discipline. In 1955 he joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI) as a computer consultant and was asked by Frederick Terman and Albert Bowker to design a computation curriculum. He describes the difficulty in establishing computer science's autonomy from engineering programs. Fein also describes his contacts with the University of California - Berkeley, the University of North Carolina, Purdue, and other institutions. He recalls his presentation on computer science departments at the 1962 Munich meeting of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and how his plans were accepted at many academic institutions throughout the U.S. and Europe. Fein concludes with his views on the future of computer science, which entail a name change to "synnoetics" and a corresponding conceptual redirection to the interaction among intelligent beings, including humans and computers.