Case Studies
COMP 1150 — Computer Science Concepts, Fall 2026
Welcome! These are twelve short case studies about the people and choices that shaped computer science. Each one tells a true story. Each one shows you a small piece of code you can work through by hand. And each one ends with a real question that people still argue about — so you can join in.
You do not need to read them in order. Start with whatever sounds interesting.
| # | Case study | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lovelace and Turing: Can a Machine Originate? | Available |
| 2 | The Silicon Shield: TSMC, Moore’s Law, and the New Chip Wars | Available |
| 3 | Grace Hopper, Compilers & the Abstraction Bargain | Available |
| 4 | The Therac-25: When Control Flow Kills | Available |
| 5 | How We Represent People: ADTs and the Ethics of Data Modeling | Available |
| 6 | Was OOP a Mistake? Alan Kay, Smalltalk & the Backlash | Available |
| 7 | “We Must Know — We Will Know”: Gödel, Turing, and the Problem No Computer Can Solve | Available |
| 8 | Open Source and the Code an AI Learned From — Linux, Git & Copilot | Available |
| 9 | From SQL to NoSQL: Why Google Broke the Database | Available |
| 10 | Three Companies Own the Internet — ARPANET to the Cloud Oligopoly | Available |
| 11 | The Equifax Breach | Available |
| 12 | The Score and the Face: COMPAS, Facial Recognition & AI Accountability | Available |
How to read these
Every case has the same four parts:
- The Case — what happened, who was there, and what was at stake.
- How It Worked — the tech behind the story, with a short piece of code to trace.
- The Argument — the debate the case opened up, with both sides laid out.
- Discussion Questions — five questions, none with a single right answer.
Plan on about twenty to thirty minutes to read a case, plus more time for the code and the questions. There is no answer key. The questions are meant for talking and arguing about with other people — not for looking up.