Preface

The past fifty years have seen university computing move from a fringe activity to a central part of academic life. Today's seniors never knew a world without personal computers, networks, and the web. Sometimes I ask Cornell students, "When my wife and I were undergraduates at Oxford, there were separate men's and women's colleges. If we wanted to meet in the evening, how did we communicate?" They never knew a world without telephones and email, let alone smartphones, Google, and Facebook.

They are also unaware that much of modern computing was developed by universities. Universities were the pioneers in end-user computing. The idea that everybody is a computer user is quite recent. Many organizations still do not allow their staff to choose their own computers, decide how to use them, and select the applications to run. But end-user computing has been established in universities since the 1960s. When the computer industry was slow in seeing the potential, universities took the initiative. This narrative describes a thirty year period when academic computing diverged from the mainstream. Universities built their own state-of-the-art systems and ran them successfully. They led the development of timesharing and local area (campus) networks. They were major contributors to distributed computing, email, the national networks, and the web.

This is not a history. It is a memoir. As a student, faculty member, and administrator, I lived though many of these developments. From 1978 to 1995 I was in charge of computing at two of the leading universities, Dartmouth College and Carnegie Mellon. After 1995 I was no longer personally involved in the developments, but in the final section I describe how academic computing and the mainstream have now come together again, to the benefit of both.

There is a glaring gap that runs throughout this narrative. It says little about the impact of computing on academic life, on teaching, research, and in libraries. The very final section has a few thoughts about educational computing, but it is a huge topic that deserves a much fuller treatment.

Disruptive change is an underlying theme of this period. I have tried to give some indication of what it was like to be a computing director, the opportunities and the excitement, but also the pressures and uncertainties. I was fortunate in working for two remarkable presidents, John Kemeny at Dartmouth and Richard Cyert at Carnegie Mellon. Each was a visionary in seeing how computing could be used in higher education. When I remember my colleagues at other universities wrestling with less enlightened leaders, I know how lucky I was.