ABSTRACT
Computer science as an academic discipline had its origin in the invention of the electronic digital computing machine. Conceivably, a computer science could have developed independent of any machine at all. For thousands of years, people studied computation processes. Some simple computing devices, such as the abacus, were invented. The first computers were made out of unreliable vacuum tubes, and hence the problem of reliability also loomed as a big initial issue. Some clever designs were developed that allowed reliable computation with unreliable components. These designs utilized redundancy and were reminiscent of nervous system organization. Some of the developments in computer science, such as data base design, have been driven principally by demands on the applications side. Artificial intelligence has been driven both by the applications side and by the desire to understand intelligence. Intelligence can be viewed as a natural thing, or as something completely de novo in the universe.
