An Apple on Every Desk

Dartmouth reprograms computing history

AH over the Dartmouth campus, sounds of change spread into dorm hallways: the click of keyboards late into night, the whirr and screech of printers in early morning, the beep of video games, and the raspy melodies of mechanized voice-boxes on quiet afternoons. There are" telltale sights as well on the pathways and in the cafes: a box of software diskettes next to books left on a table, stickers depicting half-eaten, rainbow-striped apples (the Apple Computer, Inc. logo) on bumpers and windbreakers, students toting portable computers in canvas cases, a keyboard and display unit amidst railroad ties at the bonfire on the Green.

These are the subtle signs of a computer revolution that's changing Dartmouth. Once the darling of the hard sciences, the computer has found its way into virtually every branch of the liberal arts. Knowing that in some ways education would never again be the same, the College worked out a deal with Apple last year, offering students the company's Macintosh computers for about half the market price - $1265 without printer. Parents of incoming freshmen received Macintosh brochures along with letters urging them to buy a personal computer. Last fall, some 80 percent of the freshman class arrived with checks in hand; more than 40 percent of the upperclassmen have followed suit. The portable computer they purchased - designed with the novice in mind comes complete with a software package that includes Apple's Mac Write (word processing) and MacPaint (graphics) software programs. Since the College has hardwired every dorm and a few fraternities, the students can use a specially-designed DarTerminal program to connect their Macintoshes to Kiewit Computation Center, where they can tap into data bases of the College's mainframe computers and take advantage of such services as electronic mail.

"Dartmouth has made a fantastic leap," says William Arms, Vice Provost for Computing and Planning. "Within one year, we've gone from about 100 personal computers on campus to more than 2500. The most important thing about this new network is that it goes everywhere: almost every academic office, every dorm room, every personal or shared computer, is on the network." According to Arms, Dartmouth's network is not only the best, it's one of the least expensive. As far as Eugene Fucci, Assistant Director of Computing Services at the College, can see, "There's not a network in the world that satisfies the need for it like Dartmouth's does. For its purpose, our network is almost perfect."

Just by inserting the right diskette and typing in a few simple codes," Arms explains, "students can connect up to a wide range of on- and off-campus computers. Watch." Arms turns to the Fat Mac - a high-powered version of the Macintosh - on his desk, which is already running the DarTeminal program. He types in his name, rattles a few more keys and gains entry into the main computer at Cornell. "Have mail" appears on the screen. At a touch, the screen shows a listing of all the mail Arms has received since he last reviewed his Cornell file, complete with the sender's name, the date and time, and summaries of the contents of each note. Any Dartmouth student can open such an account at almost any college in the country, he explains. "Dartmouth doesn't charge them a thing. Neither does the phone company. All they have to pay is the charge for keeping an account at the host institution.

"This is the right way to do educational computing," President emeritus John G. Kemeny says of the Dartmouth network. More than a few professors relish the thought of contacting their students at a moment's notice, and except for telephone calls, nothing is faster than electronic mail.

While the personal computer network is new to Dartmouth, the lead in academic computing is an accustomed role. The College stepped into the computing spotlight in the early '60s, when Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Thomas E. Kurtz teamed with Kemeny and students Stephen Garland '63 (now Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the College) and Robert Hargraves '6l to create the BASIC computer language and the world's first operational time-sharing system. At the time, Dartmouth had a small computer that could accommodate only one user at a time. To use the computer, one had to punch a program On IBM cards, submit them to an authorized operator (who fed them through the machine in batches), then return the next day to pick up the results. Holepunching had to be exact, and the results often contained more questions than answers.

Foreseeing the day when every Dartmouth student would use computers, Kemeny, Kurtz, and their students redesigned Dartmouth's system by programming one machine to handle communications and another to serve each individual user. To shield novices from the inner maze of the machine and allow them to program, the team wrote the BASIC language and later added the input command that allows programmers to schedule interruptions where the computer will ask for information. "The input command," Kemeny notes, "made possible all truly interactive computer programs, from management information systems to computer games." Today, time-sharing is a standard operation, and BASIC is the most "friendly" and widely used programming language. True to form, the sophisticated new True BASIC software package - which Kemeny and Kurtz cowrote in response to popular versions that compromised the language opens with a down-to-earth "Hello."

Although simplicity wasn't the only factor in the College's decision to go with the Mac, as students call it, the Macintosh answers Dartmouth's commitment to make computers more human. For hard-to-remember codes, Apple substituted a hand-held mechanism called a mouse and window displays that list options for text editing. To move a paragraph or change typeface in the Mac Write word processing program, one simply moves the mouse across his desktop until the cursor lands on the function he wants, then clicks the mouse's built-in button. To draw a line or fill in a shape, to make a chart or enlarge shapes or the screen using the MacPaint graphics program, he does the same thing: pick an option, position the cursor, and click. "MacPaint is outstanding," says Arms. "It's as flexible as a pencil. Put it in the hand of an artist, you get art; put it in the hand of an engineer, you get graphs."

Not only engineers. MacPaint has put computer graphing within the grasp of humanities scholars. There's no need for T-squares or technical expertise. In Arms' eyes, that's the whole point. "We try to pack more into the Dartmouth education every year without overloading students," he says. "We hope the computers will eliminate drudgery and free them up to spend more time on actual assignments than on the mechanics of working."

"The beauty of the Macintosh is that it doesn't change the way you think," says psychology prof Chris Jernstedt.

"The way you naturally react is how it's programmed to react. You don't have to learn a standardized progression of codewords. When you want to do some- thing, you just go ahead and do it."

Many a budding humanities scholar who swore he'd never so much as stroll through Kiewit came to rely on the computer for word-processing long before the College offered half-priced Macs. As a result, the terminal stations around campus crammed up at key hours and some computer science students, who needed the machines most, couldn't get their hands on keyboards. The Kiewit crunch faced administrators with a tough choice. Since the time-sharing system can serve only 500 machines at a time, they had to either add mainframe computers and hundreds of expensive terminals or induce students to buy desktop models. Personal computers, they decided, could operate as word processors without help from Kiewit; and the Mac, in particular, offered im- pressive graphics the standard compu- ter terminals could not.

When a student runs Kiewit programs on his Mac, he typically ties up a line to the mainframe for less than three minutes, the time it takes the big machine to transfer ("download") the software he desires. While the majority of Macintosh owners use their machines principally to write ("process") papers and play video games, word processing is, as Arms says, "nothing to sniff at." •Even for the crackshot typist, the Mac means a few more hours to refine a paper; for others, it can make the difference between half-a-night's sleep and none at all.

Professors are finding the end products more rewarding to read. "Student papers are unquestionably better,' says Jernstedt. "They're revised more. Students are working much harder on the clarity of their writing." Since Jernstedt's students aren't strangers to the computer, he lets them drop off diskettes in lieu of printed copies; his editing is on-screen when they rewrite. Once the College finishes connecting residences and department buildings to the same transmission line this coming fall, Jernstedt and his students will send drafts and corrections back and forth via electronic mail.

Easier revision isn't the only boon to student writing. Bell Laboratories' Writer's Workbench - a series of more than 30 software programs designed to make users faster, sharper writers - is already stored in the UNIX system of a College mainframe accessible to Mac owners. Among other things, Writer's Workbench programs correct spelling and punctuation, check grammar and usage, and note any overuse of long words. One program even lets professors check the coherence of a formal essay by juxtaposing the critical first and last lines of each paragraph. Although a few English professors worry that such programs could prevent students from getting a handle on writing from the ground up, many of their Sanborn colleagues are giving UNIX a try. Enough have been impressed, notes assistant chairman Louis Renza, that the department is exploring teaching methods that take advantage of the software.

Writer's Workbench is just one item in the PC boom. Local computer stores will soon have a shelful of diskettes for every conceivable use. But software is something the College hasn't left to the market. One team of programmers, led by microcomputers application specialist Steven Maker, set out to tailor drill diskettes for College courses soon after the deal with Apple was cut. Professors and student technicians are getting in on the act. To date, the Courseware Development Group has compiled a host of courseware packages that run cheaper than most paperbacks (typically $4.00 per diskette) and promise to liven up coursework in subjects ranging from French to computer science. Students short on cash but well-stocked with blank diskettes may copy the courseware as long as they don't sell it; and a copy can be made in minutes. More programs are on the way every month; and soon Dartmouth, which joined 25 other colleges and universities in a softwaresharing program called the Apple University Consortium, will have access to courseware developed at other schools.

The great advantage to the College is that virtually every department is developing software custom-made for its needs. With the help of courseware developers, sociology professors Robert Sokol and Deborah King have designed a sociology statistics laboratory for the Macintosh. Called "SocStat", the program allows students to analyze data - up to 2000 observations - from actual surveys on such topics as social deviance and marriage roles. The student simply chooses a dataset, runs any of a number of tests - the results of which appear in separate windows on the screen prints out the windows he wants and turns in the product for homework credit. Meanwhile, beginning philosophy students sharpen their logic on the screen. Their tutor is a program called "Venn" that makes syllogism training less abstract. The Venn program makes a syllogism, the student maps out premises by shading Venn diagrams, and the program checks his diagram and conclusions.

Language courses have used computer concepts for some time. Group drill sessions have students pronouncing better, the drills may not quicken their thinking in a foreign tongue. Thanks to courseware programmers and professors from various departments, there's now a "Drill" program that lets any instructor design a computer exercise for better speaking. Using the Mac Write and MacPaint programs, the professor writes and illustrates his own drill script and adds reference materials.

The Department of Earth Sciences is also putting its students to the test on the computer. As department chairman Richard Birnie '66 explains, the trick in fieldwork is to think three-dimensionally: "The geologist sees the surface expression of, for example, a fold. To understand and interpret it, he has to extrapolate that expression to depth." But fieldwork can overwhelm beginning students, and appropriate sites can be hours away. With the help of programming whiz Robert White '84, Birnie and colleagues have created a computer graphics program - meant for the Mac's high-resolution graphics - whose block diagrams depict surface and depth expressions of faults and folds. Starting this fall, students will use it to study connections between the surface and subterrain, quiz themselves on their interpretations and even generate their own block diagrams. Birnie, for one, is smacking his lips. "We can only find one nice fold in the field," he says, "but the computer allows us to make any number of them."

Three of the more novel software packages are the work of students. One, the computer science "HandsOn" program developed by John Glenn '85, makes the abstract concept of binary trees more concrete; a binary tree is represented graphically and the student is given words to alphabetize or arithmetic expressions to parse. Two others, the brainchildren of student assistant John Meier 'B6, are giving Professor Jon Appleton's beginning music students - many of whom have never blown a horn or tickled piano keys - a feel for what it takes to compose music.

One program, dubbed "Mozart" because it mimicks the composer's famous musical dice game, lets students compose a minuet by arranging six preset two-measure phrases in different orders on a staff. The other; called "Appletones," lets students experiment with repetition, volume changes and timbre by arranging 12 pre-defined sounds. In "Appletones," notes are represented as blocks. To adjust the volume and timbre of a note, the student simply moves the mouse and changes the shape of the block. In both programs, the student can play back his composition through a voice-box in the Mac - a sound some liken to an arcade organ - and run off a hard copy on the printer. Once he has reached a satisfactory arrangement, he stores the entry and hands in his diskette as homework. Professor Appleton leaves comments in the file, so when the student tries the next assignment, the tips appear on the screen.

While some of their classmates are pouring through card catalogs for next week's research paper, Mac owners are getting a bibliography in minutes. The library has catalogued some 600,000 volumes for computer searches, and it won't be long before the entire College collection can be crosschecked on the Mac. Because Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art has joined the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and five other institutions in a Museum Prototype Project that is part of the J. Paul Getty Art History Information Program, art history students will soon be able to do much of their factual research on the computer. Under the project, paintings housed in each museum are being catalogued for different types of crosschecks, including searches on such artistic themes as the Annunciation.

With the Mac network, physics students who want to change their lab schedule for the week no longer have to comb the campus for the appropriate teaching assistant or interrupt their professor's dinner. They just switch on their Macs, connect to Kiewit, type in a password, and the computer tells them which lab sections have slots available. Changes are up to them. When it comes time for the day's experiments, the teaching assistants in charge simply calls up the last-minute list and calls the roll. And thanks to graduate students in the Computer and Information Science program, students can now make Dick's House appointments from their desks at any hour.

"My Mac gets a real workout," says Michael Acker '88, a confessed computer fanatic from Santa Barbara, Calif, who spent many a sleepless night in high school writing programs for fun. Acker is one of a growing number of students who believe that computer familiarity is key for future success. He uses his computer for all of his course papers, for late-night programming, even for diversion. "Sometimes when I want to hack around for a few hours in my room," he says, "I just log onto the XYZ program, and I can talk to anyone on it at more than 20 schools in the Northeast." XYZ isn't the only eyeopener, notes Eugene Fucci. Students can subscribe to such national computer indices as the CompuServe Information Service. "It's fantastic," says Fucci, "just to think of how much students can now expand their horizons from their dorm rooms."

Not so fast, cautions Professor Jernstedt; afternoons at the Mac could breed a disturbing kind of isolation. Students may type away without a word in Kiewit, Jernstedt notes, but they have to sit side-by-side and encounter others en route. "With a computer in your room," he says, "you don't even have to go to Baker to check card listings or to Kiewit to type in a paper." Jernstedt worries that "electronic mail may not be such a good thing for the campus. A student could go through a course without ever meeting the professor who's supposed to make an impact on his or her life." And that's one thing no one wants to see happen at Dartmouth.

Whether or not it actually removes students from their professors, one thing's for sure: the Mac is bringing some students closer to home. The UNIX system that stores Writer's Workbench also has a cross-country communicating service. A number of seasoned Mac owners have stopped collect calling to their parents' delight- and started sending notes to computers in their parents' offices. Some, like Acker, whose parents have computers with phone hookups to nearby computer centers, are even bantering back and forth with Mom and Dad every night. All for the cost of a local call. Since computer conversations can be stored, Acker has virtually his whole Dartmouth career on file - course papers, homework assignments, important class notes, - complete with reflections keyboarded to his family and friends. He can review and reprint any of the documents at a moment's notice.

Students aren't the only beneficiaries of Dartmouth's marriage to the personal computer. As part of the year-old Computer Alumni College, some alumni are planning a week-long summer break in Hanover to get acquainted with the personal computer and get it to run everything from a business program to a recipe search. The College is also catering to corporations. Computing for Every Manager, a two-week summer program in its second year, gives executives training technological perspective and trains them to ask the right questions about computers. The short course is an offshoot of Computer and Information Science, a two-year degree program that is drawing raves from top companies. As CIS Executive Director Kent Morton explains, the program started five years ago because "we'd heard a lot of concern from corporations about the capabilities of people coming out of graduate programs in Computer Science. Businesses told us that, while their new employees were technically proficient, they had little or no perception of a business environments or business needs. They had to be retrained." The CIS approach - to train students to work just as naturally with controllers as with programmers - sits well with such companies as CIGNA and General Mills; they now look to Dartmouth every year.

It may be years before other colleges catch up to Dartmouth, thinks Thomas Kurtz. Cornell and CarnegieMellon both have announced plans to provide full personal computer networks but haven't gotten much past the drawing board. "Dartmouth is a hard model to copy, anyway," he says. "We always have been, because we depend so much on homegrown blocks - a different Basic language, a different network. We're not doing anything that is in and of itself unique. We're just doing it all. What the network involving mainframes and personal computers amounts to is an acceptance of technology on campus. No one is in awe of it. Most other campuses are still governed by the Sunday supplement mentality of it all. Some schools are figuring out the Dartmouth philosophy of computing, but it'll be very hard for them to duplicate Dartmouth's system."

William Arms, who will be leaving to go to Carnegie-Mellon, eyes the Macintosh on his desk and thinks of the future. "Very soon, it will be taken for granted that every student has a computer," he says with a smile. "When 60 percent of Dartmouth students are fluent Mac users and programmers, we're going to see all sorts of fantastic things happening with routine assignments in ordinary courses." "At that point," says John G. Kemeny, "we will use the computer as naturally as we use books in the library."

President emeritus John G. Kemeny: "This is the right way to do educational computing.''

The beauty of theMacintosh is that it doesn'tchange the way you think.Whey you want to dosomething, you just goahead and do it.

The great advantage to theCollege is that virtuallyevery department isdeveloping custom-madesoftware.

...more than 600,000College volumes arecatalogued for computersearches...

As Prof. Tom Kurtz put it,"We're not doing anythingthat is in and of itselfunique. We're just doing itall"

The first thing Fred Pfaff '85 had to do forthis assignment was put away his trustySmith-Corona and meet the Mouse.