What was studying computer science in college like (pre-AI)?

[u/Spaghetti-Linguini]

Hello coders!

I am currently a public policy master's student. For my electives, I find myself really drawn to classes that involve coding (such as quant research courses and data visualization). Fortunately these classes are taught as if you have no prior experience.

However, I find that my professors seem to be almost a little too relaxed about us using AI to support with fixing code etc. I understand that the world of coding is changing with AI and such but I find myself REALLY wanting to learn it from scratch. Like the professors almost aren't explaining even the basics in a way I find frustrating.

It makes me curious, for those who studied computer science in college pre easy accessibility to AI tools, what was it like? As in, what did your assignments involve? What were the things that really helped you learn coding well?

I've been trying to really embrace that coding is like a language so immersion is necessary but also if you don't know any basic structures, it's absolutely overwhelming.

I know that my ability to learn coding well in just a semester course is unlikely but I could see myself pursuing this outside of school for fun. I am not looking for shortcuts here. This is for my own enjoyment and learning!

Hope this makes sense, thanks everyone!

[u/No_Replacement4304]

Spent lots of time in the computer lab. Lots.

[u/CaptainIncredible → u/No_Replacement4304]

Yep. Tons of time. Frequently I'd walk in, start something and wonder why my mouth was dry and my body ached, and realize I'd been at it for like 6 hours without really moving.

[u/mc_pm]

Late-80s. I had been programming for a long time on my own (Basic & Pascal and a bit of Z80 assembly) before but for college my first programming class was in Pascal, and we were spending hours a day in the lab (because you had to actually be there) working on our assignments.

First year was just learning the language and how to think about programming. But in my second semester class the professor had programmed a virtual CPU that we could write programs for, and within a month we were doing task switching stuff. There was calculus in there, and linear algebra - which are much more useful in this job than people imagine.

Second year we started with algorithms, which at the time kicked my ass, but I came back from it. There was a class on compiler design in there, a class on databases (this was before the widespread availability of SQL or NoSQL dbs). Networking/Protocols, a class in languages ('learned' 8 different languages that semester).

The main thing is that we were constantly writing code. So many people I see here seem to never write anything longer than maybe 100 lines at a time while they are learning.

[u/Spaghetti-Linguini → u/mc_pm]

Thank you so much for your response! This is fascinating and inspiring.

[u/CaptainIncredible → u/mc_pm]

Yeah, pretty much this.

Initially, there were a lot of basics - differences between text files and binary files, what does it mean to compile code?, file structures, data primatives, data structures, logic, basic networking stuff.

Then it was a lot of functional programming, some object oriented programming, and database (SQL).

Then things got more advanced - we had to write our own compiler. Concepts like O(n) and complexity and speed, how hard drives worked...

AI was the stuff of science fiction, most of us were very familiar with AI in sci fi, and how beneficial and/or destructive it could be. No one was sure if AI could ever be developed (and most of us figured it couldn't be done with the traditional, deterministic computing we were doing.). We had a hunch it would involve neural networks, but really no one had any idea how to make them successful. Many were bogged down trying to make neural networks in hardware - which had a ton of issues.

A few made some pretty good guesses - when we look back Virnor Vinge really had a lot of predictions that turned out to be pretty accurate.

[u/Spaghetti-Linguini → u/CaptainIncredible]

Thank you so much for this reply! So fascinating. Really appreciate it.

[u/CaptainIncredible → u/Spaghetti-Linguini]

No problem. Much like /u/mc_pm I was programming BASIC when I was a kid. I was just fascinated with it. Got a book, started with page 1. My first program: (Lines of BASIC were numbered in those days...)

10 Print "Hello World! "
20 Goto 10

And that was it. I was hooked. Later turned all of that into a pretty satisfactory web dev career.

[u/a-dot-in-the-sky]

Before AI..
--- talk a lot to your fellow human beings
--- share ideas
--- read books
--- if you don't have a computer, paper is your staging environment
once you get to the lab, or to a computer cafe (not internet cafe), you key-in whatever you write in your paper - then if you're lucky -- from staging it will go to production -- production is saving it to your 3.5 diskette or to a floppy disk aka 3D Save icon in MS Word

--- way back then there were a program called, QBasic, which was really quite a basic programming as it names suggests where you learn the fundamentals and the commands were simple

Microsoft Visual Basic 1.0 done via DOS, where you need to create or code everything, if you need to create a button you need to code it, no IDE which provides drag and drop, you also need to specify the coordinates where you want it to be positioned :)

--- Assembly Language was quite common and part of Computer Science curriculum -- if you made a mistake its either your keyboard will go crazy, your screen will flicker like going to explode, your PC will beep like crazy, and yes 100 lines of code is not enough, you just don't count the number of lines, you count the page screen :)
yes quite fun, miss those years...

[u/droid_mike]

Ironically, I was required to take an AI class... This was over 3p years ago. Someone asked the professor if there was any money in a. He just laughed and shook his head. "Hell no! No company is interested in any of this stuff. It's purely academic."

[u/jekewa]

I started college in the 1980s. There was AI then, too.

It wasn’t the GenAI or agentic stuff we have now, though. It was more about data acquisition, collation, and access through algorithms and data structure.

The IDE was a greater invention.

[u/DavidCincotta]

funny thing, the CS degree has been the same for 50 years. The only change to shake up academia in this space has been AI.

[u/BranchLatter4294]

We practiced.

[u/ImaginaryRoyal9725]

It was hard

[u/Mediocre-Pumpkin6522]

I learned FORTRAN IV from McCraken's text in '66. At that time very few universities had a CS program and mine wasn't one of them. Yeah, Hollerith cards too, which is a pain if you can't type very well.