On Tues., Oct. 19, Sycamore Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) held its first official meeting in room 212.

Along with officers juniors Krishna Suresh and Rishi Verma, club chair senior Marcial Machado taught attendees about Linux, an operating system—just like Windows, iOS, or Mac OS. Machado explained what exactly Linux is, why people use it, and a few pros and cons of the platform, while Suresh and Verma helped club members learn to input basic commands. 

“It’s kind of the heart of a lot of aspects of computer science and when I was talking to a lot of my friends I realized it wasn’t actually something that a lot of people know about. And so I kind of felt that that was a really good place to start off and, you know, see where we go from there depending on how people felt,” Machado said. 

As an organization that focuses on learning, but at the same time aims to emphasize its nature as a club, Machado says that ACM aims to be “a hub or a home base” for those interested in computer science and computer engineering.

“I feel that computer science always tends to be the most imposing of, like, self-study stuff. It’s really disheartening when you ask someone, ‘Oh, where did you learn this programming language?’ or ‘Oh, how did you learn to do that?’ and they just say, ‘Oh, I Googled it’ or ‘Oh, I just read some books.’ Like, that’s not a lot of information to go off of,” Machado said.

Attendee Claire Atkinson, sophomore, came to the meeting willing to learn whatever the club had to offer in regards to computer science and computer engineering. 

“I think technology is pretty cool and I wanted to know as much about it as I could, so this should probably be good to learn… I did [learn a lot today]. I think there’s a lot of generalizations in technology since it’s so prevalent modern-day-wise, so I guess it’s cool to learn what these things really are,” Atkinson said.