Oral history interview with Joseph F. Traub

Transcript, 50 pp. Audio file available at http://purl.umn.edu/95283The main topic is institutions in computing. Traub begins by discussing why computer science has developed as a discipline at some institutions but not others. Institutions that are highlighted include Stanford, Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon. Traub discusses his experiences as chairman of the computer science departments at Carnegie-Mellon and later Columbia. Other topics include: industrial and government funding of computer science departments (in particular the role of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department); the relationships between academic centers, such as MIT, Stanford, Columbia, and Carnegie-Mellon; and the importance of educational institutions to regional centers of industrial computing. At the end of the interview Traub returns to a topic of his earlier interviews, his experiences at Bell and Watson Laboratories