Back in 1965, when computers still occupied entire rooms and programming was done on punched cards, Professors Richard Conway and Robert Walker proposed the creation of a Department of Computer Science. More importantly, they managed to scare up a $1 million grant from the Sloan Foundation to start up the new enterprise, which became a department shared by the Colleges of Engineering and Arts and Sciences. Juris Hartmanis was the first chair.

Today, with a faculty of over 50 -- still including Hartmanis -- offering more than 100 courses to CS majors and students from all over the university, the department is consistently ranked among the top five in the nation by the National Research Council. It has awarded 360 Ph.D.s, 1,400 master's and 2,400 bachelor's degrees. Students have gone forth to become professors -- in a couple of cases deans -- and corporate researchers.

On Oct. 1 a few of them will return to speak at a symposium celebrating the department's 40th anniversary. The symposium, to be held from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Call Auditorium, is open to all members of the Cornell community and their invited guests.

"Long before computer science became a mature discipline whose technology is changing the face of the world, the Cornell CS department believed that computer science was a deeply coherent intellectual discipline," said Charles Van Loan, the J.C. Ford Professor of Engineering and chair of the department. "We saw its traditional scientific character, the interplay between theory and experiment and we imagined traits never seen before, such as the ability to design in ways nearly unconstrained by the physical world."

Invited speakers, all Cornell graduates, include: