 With Irving Copi he sketched the necessary design for general purpose computing.Burks helped found the university's computer science department, first as the Logic of Computers group in 1956, of which he was the director, then as a graduate program in 1957, and then as an undergraduate program within the new Department of Computer and Communication in 1967, which he chaired until 1971.He declined a position heading up a different university's computing center, citing his primary interest as the purely theoretical aspects of computing machines.