20 years ago
This weekend I got a phone call from the Tartan, the CMU student newspaper. When I was a student I was news editor and then editor in chief. During that time, among many other things, I wrote some of the earliest articles about CMU's budding plans to team up with IBM to put a computer in every room and on every desk. It was 1982; this was revolutionary.
The person who contacted me is doing a 20-year "retrospective" piece about that, and about what computing was like on campus back then, and how the students felt about all this, and so on. Some of his questions were too detailed for me to really be able to answer 20 years later -- like, yeah, I know that some students were upset (I think the main objection was financial, followed by the corporate-versus-educational role of a university), but I don't really remember how many or how vocal they were any more. But I did find myself thinking about computing at CMU when I was a student.
Here is part of the email I sent him:
How many students actually had their own computers at the time? Is there anything PCs in 1982 could be compared to today?
For all practical purposes, nobody had computers. A few people had *terminals* in their dorm rooms, but that was very much the exception. The computers available to students were DEC mainframes running TOPS-20, and you could connect to them from terminal rooms in the academic buildings. There were a few clusters in larger dorms (Morewood and I think some Hill dorm). A very few people had privately-purchased terminals in their rooms and could connect somehow, I think through dial-up. (I don't remember how that worked.) There was no internet access. (OK, there was no internet in the sense you're used to, though CMU was connected to the ARPAnet. Undergrads weren't unless they worked in the CS department, though.)
The original Macintosh -- the little all-in-one box with the 8" monitor and 128k of memory -- came out in 1983 or 1984. (I think 1984, but I was discussing this with someone recently who thought 1983.) IBM PCs were a couple years away, I think. You used the mainframes for your personal stuff as well as your class work, within the account limits. (Each semester, each course granted you a certain amount of CPU time and a certain amount of printing quota, and when you used it up you were done.) At the time all of this was innovative to me -- my previous computer experience had been on paper terminals with punched paper tape -- but it looks pretty bad from the vantage point of 20 years later.
The CS department had some single-user machines along with their multi-user Unix boxes (Vax 750s and 780s, if I recall correctly). The idea of single-user machines was certainly out there, but most students at CMU in 1982 had never touched a workstation. So the IBM plan was pretty innovative, but also foreign.
[Aside: I was later reminded that the Apple IIe was in use back then, and in fact I knew people who had them. They played games on them.]
[Questions about who used computers and how]
People in the technical colleges used computers a lot and used email and a system of bulletin boards. (These evolved into the Andrew groups later. There were many fewer in 1982.) The email was to talk to each other; there was no off-campus connection for the average student. (Again, if you worked in CS you might have this access.) Most people in the non-technical colleges used computers when they had to and did not develop the "email culture", so to speak -- email was a way to get notices from your instructors, maybe, but they didn't use it to chat with friends much. A non-trivial number of students went most of a semester without logging on. Even in programming courses, while you obviously used the computer to do your homework you submitted a listing on paper to be graded. (Toward the end of my time as a student electronic submission was becoming more common.)
As an aside, internet-style names (something.com, something.edu, etc) hit the net in about 1985 (after I graduated). The machines students had access to were called things like TOPS-E and (in the CS department) CMU-CS-G. Just a bit of trivia for you.
[...]
The progress of the last 20 years is pretty staggering, and it makes me wonder what will happen in 20 more years that will cause me to look back to today's "primitive" environment. 20 years ago there weren't many home computers and computers were seen as toys for hackers and tools for certain professionals; now we teach our young children about them. I didn't touch a computer until I was 15; my neice was using a computer when she was 3. They're pervasive, and that will continue. I don't think people in 1982 were any better equipped to say where things were headed than I am now, though.
The person who contacted me is doing a 20-year "retrospective" piece about that, and about what computing was like on campus back then, and how the students felt about all this, and so on. Some of his questions were too detailed for me to really be able to answer 20 years later -- like, yeah, I know that some students were upset (I think the main objection was financial, followed by the corporate-versus-educational role of a university), but I don't really remember how many or how vocal they were any more. But I did find myself thinking about computing at CMU when I was a student.
Here is part of the email I sent him:
How many students actually had their own computers at the time? Is there anything PCs in 1982 could be compared to today?
For all practical purposes, nobody had computers. A few people had *terminals* in their dorm rooms, but that was very much the exception. The computers available to students were DEC mainframes running TOPS-20, and you could connect to them from terminal rooms in the academic buildings. There were a few clusters in larger dorms (Morewood and I think some Hill dorm). A very few people had privately-purchased terminals in their rooms and could connect somehow, I think through dial-up. (I don't remember how that worked.) There was no internet access. (OK, there was no internet in the sense you're used to, though CMU was connected to the ARPAnet. Undergrads weren't unless they worked in the CS department, though.)
The original Macintosh -- the little all-in-one box with the 8" monitor and 128k of memory -- came out in 1983 or 1984. (I think 1984, but I was discussing this with someone recently who thought 1983.) IBM PCs were a couple years away, I think. You used the mainframes for your personal stuff as well as your class work, within the account limits. (Each semester, each course granted you a certain amount of CPU time and a certain amount of printing quota, and when you used it up you were done.) At the time all of this was innovative to me -- my previous computer experience had been on paper terminals with punched paper tape -- but it looks pretty bad from the vantage point of 20 years later.
The CS department had some single-user machines along with their multi-user Unix boxes (Vax 750s and 780s, if I recall correctly). The idea of single-user machines was certainly out there, but most students at CMU in 1982 had never touched a workstation. So the IBM plan was pretty innovative, but also foreign.
[Aside: I was later reminded that the Apple IIe was in use back then, and in fact I knew people who had them. They played games on them.]
[Questions about who used computers and how]
People in the technical colleges used computers a lot and used email and a system of bulletin boards. (These evolved into the Andrew groups later. There were many fewer in 1982.) The email was to talk to each other; there was no off-campus connection for the average student. (Again, if you worked in CS you might have this access.) Most people in the non-technical colleges used computers when they had to and did not develop the "email culture", so to speak -- email was a way to get notices from your instructors, maybe, but they didn't use it to chat with friends much. A non-trivial number of students went most of a semester without logging on. Even in programming courses, while you obviously used the computer to do your homework you submitted a listing on paper to be graded. (Toward the end of my time as a student electronic submission was becoming more common.)
As an aside, internet-style names (something.com, something.edu, etc) hit the net in about 1985 (after I graduated). The machines students had access to were called things like TOPS-E and (in the CS department) CMU-CS-G. Just a bit of trivia for you.
[...]
The progress of the last 20 years is pretty staggering, and it makes me wonder what will happen in 20 more years that will cause me to look back to today's "primitive" environment. 20 years ago there weren't many home computers and computers were seen as toys for hackers and tools for certain professionals; now we teach our young children about them. I didn't touch a computer until I was 15; my neice was using a computer when she was 3. They're pervasive, and that will continue. I don't think people in 1982 were any better equipped to say where things were headed than I am now, though.