As I actually began to touch the surface of what Computer Science is having taken a few classes at San Jose State University, I realized that at the very least what they teach us in school is completely different how I imagined it to be. Programming wasn't the super mysterious and purely magical result giver, a lot of theory goes into it and design: data structures, hardware architectures, evolving coding languages. The languages I find to be most interesting as representations of how to essentially 'see' code in different ways. Since SJSU has a focus on Java, we 'see' pieces of code as interactions between objects or things. This, in some sense, affects data structures too. How code is represented and recognized often leads to how it can be organized.
Essentially, school has filled in some of the mysteries of the 'black box' that computers were, along with it's 'black magic.' So while my history of Computer Science hasn't really been about Computer Science's history (like knowledge on what changed between generations of computer languages and why), this is a small snippet of what it has been for me. At the same time, I'd don't really mind; working with what is current and honing those skills mean more to me than potentially useful principles history may teach -- and I know myself well enough that studying history isn't an effective use of my own time as I don't approach it willingly.
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