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This paper presents the goals and organization of a course about programming designed to provide entering students in a graduate program with a cultural enrichment in their professional lives. The students are expected to have taken at least two programming courses prior to this one and, therefore, to be familiar with at least two programming languages, both as students and users. Teaching someone how to program is similar to teaching him to play a musical instrument; neither skill can be taught—they must be learned. However, the teacher still serves several vital purposes: to present a set of rules for producing well-formed utterances; to offer numerous demonstrations of his own skill; and to function as an involved critic. Finally, the teacher is the source of information about the process in which the student is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the research project in microprogramming and emulation at State University of New York at Buffalo consisted of three phases: the evaluation of various possible machines to support this research; the decision to purchase one such machine, which appears to he superior to the others considered; and the organization and definition of goals for each group in the project. Each of these phases is reported, with emphasis placed on the early results achieved in this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates generally unavailable parameters descriptive of a computing center environment. Actual data collection and reduction; Data obtained for more than 10,000 jobs run at the University of Michigan Computing Center during a four-week period; Components of the University of Michigan Executive System that processes every job run.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in the previous issues including "A Comparison of the Primal-Simplex and Primal-Dual Algorithms for Linear Programming," by R.K. Mueller and L. Cooper, "Algorithm and Formula," by T. Wangsness and J. Franklin, and a letter which further expounded the terms algorithm and program.

Presents several letters to the editor related to computer science. Comment on the remarks made by Association of Computing Machinery Council's President in the December 1966 in the journal "Communications"; Focus on the article "Statistical Discrimination of the Synonymy-Antonymy Relationship Between Words," published in the January 1967 issue of the "Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery"; Report that banking systems has proposed the "Checkless Society," the automatic crediting of wages and debiting of bills from an individual's bank account, with an automatic loan to cover any deficit.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in previous issues including "On-Line Graphic Systems--An Overview," by I.E. Sutherland, an article on PUFFT System in the November 1965 issue, and "Applications of Differential Equations in General Problem Solving," by R.W. Klopfestein.

An approach to system interfaces for high level languages using basic input output support facilities is described. If Is shown that this technique can provide potentially inexpensive methods for programs to communicate with deeply embedded facilities such as command language processors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of the Annals is devoted to the history of the B 5000 mainframe system. Twenty-five years ago the B 5000 was considered by many people to be a radical departure from the traditional computer system design of that time. In many ways the design of this system and its successors is still recognized as not only pioneering but exceptional.