What is Computer Science?

I believe Computer Science is a vast multifaceted discipline.  At a
high level, it has to do with the development of computing platforms
(both hardware and software), algorithms and how they interact and
communicate with one another.  In this paper I will attempt to explain
in more detail each of these areas, although my perspective is from
that of the experienced Electrical & Computer Engineer who is still
learning a great deal about the answer to this question.

First of all, Computer Science deals heavily with computing hardware
platforms and how they are implemented.  Computer Architecture has
been a major area of research and development in Computer Science over
the years.  This deals with the higher level of how computer hardware
is implemented and connected together such as processor instruction
set architectures, memory hierarchy or different user or communication
interfaces.  As a result, there have been numerous advances in the
performance and reliability of computing hardware.  Some examples are
parallel computing, RISC architectures, memory caching, memory
management units and protected memory.  Granted these advances would
not be possible were it not for the incredible developments in
integrated circuits which have allowed for over 100 million
transistors to be packed on a chip of about one square centimeter for
about $20.  However, someone had to figure out what to do with all
those transistors or they would be useless.

Second, Computer Science is the computing software platform.
Operating systems and programming languages and environments have
evolved tremendously thanks to the tireless efforts of Computer
Science professionals.  Can you imagine programming a system by
setting toggle switches on the front of the machine to the correct
binary value of the next instruction you wanted and then hitting a
load button?  Probably sounds horrible, but it was reality at one time
for people I've worked with over the span of my career.  Then came
operating systems, but at one time they were so simple and poor that I
considered developing my own.  Computer languages themselves have
contributed heavily to all this improvement; can you imagine
developing Windows XP in machine code or assembly language?  Not
likely, but in something like C++ it came to be.

Third, Computer Science is about algorithms.  If we were just
satisfied with bubble sort, the Internet would not be what it is
today, because it would not be practical to find anything as a search
engine would be horribly slow.  We would not be able to conduct
commerce over it either, without advanced encryption algorithms.  In
fact you probably wouldn't ever have a decent spelling checker.

Forth, Computer Science is about computers interacting and
communicating with one another.  Networking communication protocols
and the software to implement them have come substantially from
Computer Science, as have the hooks in the operating system to use
them.

Finally, I'm certain there are other aspects of Computer Science I am
overlooking, but I look forward to learning about them in this class.