Applied Computer History
John Aycock · 2015
Computing history need not be dry, useless, or boring. We describe a computer science course we taught, Retrogames, that used old computer games' implementation throughout to explain techniques and systems topics that modern students are not typically exposed to in any depth, ideas that are still applicable in both game and non-game settings. As a side effect, students also learned about how development was done and problems were solved in highly-constrained environments, which gave them useful tools to add to their toolbox.