University Computer Labs? How Retro!
By Harry McCracken | Friday, March 27, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson has a good post up on the fact that the University of Virginia is shuttering its computer lab. With almost every student owning a laptop, the school decided that the time was right to save several hundred thousand dollars by eliminating access to shared machines. (It’ll continue to offer space for students to share as they work together, so the lab’s value as a collaborative environment won’t disappear.)
Reading Nate’s story gave me an unexpected Proustian rush, since it left me thinking about my college computer lab, the Boston University computer center as it existed from 1982 to 1986. I spent a fair amount of time there but haven’t given it any thought whatsoever in the last couple of decades.
Even at the time, it was anachronistic. My high school was equipped with microcomputers–Radio Shack TRS-80 Model Is–and while they were far from cutting-edge they were at least representative of the microcomputer revolution that was taking off at the time. The BU lab, however, had exactly one computer, an IBM 370 mainframe. True, it was powerful enough to satisfy the computing needs of an entire university, but you didn’t have to be a futurist to figure out that the days of students accessing mainframe applications via Teletype machines spitting out dot-matrix print on greenbar paper were numbered.
Of course, there was a time when dot-matrix output on greenbar paper was the latest thing–a fact we were reminded of by the giant bins of punch cards that sat in a corner of the lab. They were laughably obsolete, but had apparently been useful recently enough that nobody had bothered to get rid of them.
The best thing about the computer lab was its laser printer–yes, singular, for the entire school. Its print quality was so eye-popping that I didn’t mind waiting in line to pick up my printouts from one of the staffers at the counter.
So what did I use the computer center? Oddly enough, I have trouble remembering. Not word processing (I typed most of my papers, and did some on my dad’s TRS-80) and not, for the most part, research (though I may have had at least limited access to the DIALOG database). I think I did some BASIC programming for my part-time job at school (though the mainframe’s version of the language suffered in comparison to every BASIC I’d ever used on a microcomputer).
Oh, and Star Trek–a text-based version, naturally. And tic-tac-toe. And a buggy version of Monopoly that ignored some of the rules. And ELIZA. (Um, maybe computer labs weren’t absolutely essential even in the mid-1980s.)
I did have a computer of my own at the time, an Atari 400. It was of limited use for schoolwork, since I couldn’t afford a printer, and I don’t recall owning a modem. And if you’d explained to me at the time that within 25 years, nearly every college student would own a highly portable computer that was in some respects more powerful than the IBM 370 and computer labs would become archaic and unnecessary, I’d like to think that I would not only have approved but considered it an entirely plausible scenario.
As far as I know, BU isn’t ready to shut down its computer center–in fact, not only is the one I used still there, but there are other ones scattered around campus. They’re equipped with both Windows PCs and Macs–and, I assume, more than one laser printer. But I wouldn’t be completely amazing if there were a bin or two of punchcards hanging around somewhere…
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March 28th, 2009 at 5:01 pm[…] University Computer Labs? How Retro! | Technologizer Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson has a good post up on the fact that the University of Virginia is shuttering its computer lab. With almost every student owning a laptop, the school decided that the time was right to save several hundred thousand dollars by eliminating access to shared machines. (It’ll continue to offer space for students to share as they work together, so the lab’s value as a collaborative environment won’t disappear.) (tags: computer-labs university) […]
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March 28th, 2009 at 5:37 pm[…] University Computer Labs? How Retro! Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson has a good post up on the fact that the University of Virginia is shuttering its […] […]
March 27th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
College computer labs aren’t dead yet. I work for IT at a graduate school of a major university. Every student does have a laptop that is more then powerful enough for what they need. The lab provides another service though, software. We have some very expensive software licensed through the school or university that the students would not be able to afford on their own (even at student prices it would be well over $1000 a year). By providing labs, the students have access to the software they will need to use after they graduate. Without the labs, there is no way the students would have access to this software. It’s true that students don’t need labs for access to Word and email, but they do still need labs for specialized and expensive software.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
In Oregon State University they gave us a package with 10 CDs for free containing all the software we needed for college.
We only needed labs to print papers sometimes or just to brows the web and waste time between lectures. And that was before the evolution of smartphones. I guess no one uses the labs there right now.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Our students use some software that is licensed by the university and they can’t install it on their personal computers. The cost to allow students to install it on their computers is prohibitive. This means we have to provide labs for them to use the software. We do have some software they can install, but that doesn’t cover everything. University computer labs will always exist to provide students access to special software, but they probably won’t be used for much else.
March 28th, 2009 at 6:48 am
At the university of lowell in 82-83 we still used punch cards. Boy was that fun
March 28th, 2009 at 7:10 am
Our computer lab at Sussex University, circa 1979, had a PDP11 and teletypes for terminals. While there were better computer facilities available back then we had something that was unique- great minds and computers. Looking back, I think I would still rather learn computational techniques with a team of motivated great minds and old computers!
March 28th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Regarding the comment that the IBM System 370 was the only computer in the BU Computer Center. In 1986 I worked for Encore Computer Corp (at that time in Westboro, MA), and a friend and I delivered and installed an Encore Multimax in the BU Computer Center. I remember several Digital machines in the computer room (probably a DecSystem 20 and some VAXen), and maybe some other machines (Prime? DG? Burroughs? Honeywell?). But I do remember the punch card (IBM 024?) workstations were still there and people were using them.
Maybe there were parts of the computer room where the author had not ventured? He may have done his work from 3278 full-screen terminals (or clones), and so would have worked from a room of workstations, not the “glass house” with the raised floor and the ‘job control’ service counter (the punch-card equivalent of the ENTER key or the mouse click). The room where the CPUs lived was cold and noisy, and students wouldn’t typically spend much time there.
It’s amazing how many of the basic functions we use computers for today, we could do almost as fast on those boat-anchor machines with terminals. Excepting the Internet, of course (but there was DEC NET, UUCP, FIDO Net, …).
Watching the changes has been fun.
🙂
March 28th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I find this very interesting. I work for a smaller university in Michigan where the open computer labs are almost always full. In fact, during the last school year the library has virtually no open terminals during operating hours. Guess you have to be at big university to be able to afford your own laptop.
March 28th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
BU’s IT lab only got busier when I was there ’04 – ’08. If only they made remote printing a little easier.
March 28th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
My first home computer was a used TRS-80 (I think, a model 4). I learned to program it with BASIC and print to a dot-matrix printer, before I finally got a copy of SuperSCRIPSIT (word-processing program). Used it for a couple more years until it started to get flaky, and then purchased a Macintosh IIsi. I never turned back.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:01 am
I sure wish that I’d had the chance of a more interesting computer lab. Ours, in ’95 was full of standard pc’s and a few sun boxes. I always feel I missed out, by not getting a chance to pull my hair out while using punched card, or while using a teletype.
July 24th, 2009 at 7:52 am
Having started in computers in the 1970s, and used VAXes in college (an 11/780 and a 5100), it saddens me a little that people aren’t going to experience and learn shared computing or different systems.
The power and flexibility of the VAX’s Digital Command Language (DCL) made DOS and even 4DOS look like a joke, and was a worthy equal of Unix. VAXes in college were how I first had access to the internet, even before web browsers.
May 24th, 2010 at 10:46 am
EXCELLENT simulator of the TI 99/4A
http://drbray.blogspot.com/