Tuesday, April 14, 1998
Computer memories
UCLA’S PAST: Improving technology
has created a generation dependent on e-mail,
the Internet and the
all-important game of Quake
By Carol McKay
Daily Bruin Staff
Shut your eyes and try to imagine a UCLA without CD-ROMs, Bruin
OnLine and e-mail. That would mean having to actually talk to your
professor in person, sorting through thousands of cards in the
catalogues at the library and abandoning that virtual significant
other for the real thing.
It would suck.
But there was a time – and it was surprisingly not long ago –
that students at UCLA did not enjoy the blessings of ethernet
cards, disk errors and electronic search engines. There were no
dorm floor Quake tournaments, no virtual flower deliveries and no
downloadable episodes of South Park.
And even worse, the closest thing to all of these luxuries was
the typewriter.
Technological developments that have provided students with
numerous blessings actually started showing up very recently in
UCLA’s past.
The university began wiring dorm rooms for computer access in
the mid-90s.
Before that time, students who owned computers were "on their
own" when it came to figuring out how to plug it in.
Now, however, the Student Technology Center (STC) aims to ease
the transition from at-home to on-campus computing. The 4,200
computer-owning residents of the 6,000 student and faculty members
who live on campus depend upon its services.
Although Schilling doesn’t describe the relationship between
students and their hardware as a "dependency," some factors of
neediness and panic definitely exist, especially around finals
week.
"If you look at the 70 percent of students who do own computers,
the other 30 percent are all registered lab users. It signifies a
high utilization of computers within the academic arena," said
Michael Schilling, manager of the STC, adding that the STC receives
an average of 75 to 100 "help desk" calls each day. That number
doubles during the chaos of finals, with questions about fonts,
printing problems and software questions.
According to students, "dependency" is the only word to describe
the student-technology relationship.
"I think that students are pretty dependent on their computers.
They do almost all of their school work on them," said Jessica Lan,
a second-year computer science and engineering student who
volunteers this year as a resident computer intern at Sproul Hall.
Also, students spend a lot of free time – sometimes too much free
time – playing games and surfing the Internet, she said.
Each week, Lan estimates at least three or more students "come
knocking" asking for help with a printer jam, virus scan or
downloading problems. Some do it somberly, she said, but others
aren’t so composed.
"It depends a lot on the person, but some people get pretty
emotional," Lan said, describing the panic that accompanies a
computer error.
Today, UCLA is supersaturated with computers. Numerous computer
labs have sprouted up on campus, enabling students to check their
e-mail during breaks, do research on campus and finish term papers
minutes before the deadline.
At the College Library alone, students have access to nearly 100
computers, including computers for electronic reserves searches,
the College Library Instructional Computing Commons Labs (CLICC)
and dozens of outlets and ports in the reading rooms for laptop
use.
Just a few decades ago, computer accessibility in the libraries
looked very different. In a 1956 handbook called "Know Your
Library," students were briefed on the technological capabilities
of their campus libraries.
"On the ground floor of the east wing is a typing room (Room 60)
in which coin-operated typewriters may be rented at ten cents per
half-hour," reads the brochure. Students who were lucky enough to
lug a typewriter to campus themselves could use their own at no
charge and store them in one of the complimentary lockers, which
were rented out for a whole quarter’s use.
Today, UCLA’s library system is slightly more advanced, as the
proud affiliate of ORION, the online information service. Providing
information about journals, call numbers and locations of
materials, ORION is used by thousands of students who log on to the
service each year. Its sister service, MELVYL, is the UC
system-wide library database.
Bruin OnLine (BOL) is another treasure enjoyed by students. BOL,
the soft ware used by the majority of UCLA students, is upgraded
yearly with fine-tunings of Eudora and Netscape as they are made
available. Currently, the STC is investigating the possibility,
Schilling said, of adding a virus protection to BOL.
Although the most noticeable developments didn’t show their
faces to students until the last decade or so, UCLA has been a
leader in computer technologies for over half a century. In 1955,
IBM awarded the university a $1 million donation (a very generous
amount back then) for the creation of the UCLA Western Data
Processing Center (WDPC), the nation’s first computing center.
The WPDC served over 45 colleges in the 11 Western states and
Hawaii, which had not yet achieved statehood, according to a 1958
report from the Graduate School of Business Administration. An
agreement between IBM and UCLA dictated that the two share the
costs of operating the center and that all research at the center
would be "devoted to education and research."
The center’s cutting edge technologies consisted, the report
stated, of "an IBM 650 data processing machine, a 607 electronic
calculator, and various auxiliary punched card machines," which
were revolutionary back then.
Similar excitement surrounds UCLA’s current technologies,
including an updated home page last fall and the creation of My
UCLA this winter. And appropriately so. As a birthplace of the
Internet, UCLA holds close its ties to on-line activity because one
of its most prized computer scientists helped father the
Internet.
In 1969, the first signs of the Internet were observed at
Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at UCLA. The Internet was
called ARPANET, and it was part of ARPA, a program created to keep
the United States up to par in the technological competition
against the Soviet Union.
Soon after UCLA housed the first node of transmission, ARPANET
spread to Stanford University and eventually numerous other sites
across the country, enabling easier communication among
researchers. And now, thousands of students at UCLA and millions of
people around the globe have access to the World Wide Web.