Columbia University Computing History

A Chronology of Computing at Columbia University

Books, manuals, journals, magazines, notes, and artifacts... 65 years of computing at Columbia University.

Last update: Mon Feb 17 14:15:34 2020 Adapted for mobile devices 4 April 2015. Converted to HTML5 7 February 2019.

[ Credits ] [ Introduction ] [ Timeline ] [ Epilog ] [ Tables ] [ Acronyms ] [ Glossary ] [ Sources ] [ Links ] [ FAQ ]

This document gives a chronology of computing at Columbia University, as best I can piece it together, written mainly in Jan-Feb 2001, updated periodically since then (time of last update listed above). It does not aspire to be a general history or museum of computing, but in some ways it's not far from one either. Corrections, additional information, and more photos are always welcome. In most cases where the text says "today", that means 2001; obviously much has changed since then.

If you came here looking for the history of the Kermit protocol, Kermit software, or the Kermit Project, you can find some of it below in the 1980-82 timeframe, and a bit more HERE. Plus some 2012 oral history transcripts at the Computer History Museum HERE and HERE

Who am I and why did I write this? Starting around 2000, people popped into my office all the time to ask "when did such-and-such happen?" — the first e-mail, the first typesetting, the first networking, the first PC lab, the first hacker breakins, etc -- since I was there for most of it. So I took some time and wrote it down, and in so doing became fascinated with the earlier history. I was a user of the Columbia Computer Center from 1967 until 1977 in my various jobs and as a Columbia student, and I was on staff from 1974 until 2011. Brief bio: After some early programming experience in the Army (mid-1960s), the Engineering School and Physics Dept (late 1960s, early 70s), and Mount Sinai Hospital (early 70s), I came to work at the Computer Center Systems Group in 1974, hired by its manager Howard Eskin out of his graduate Computer Science classes. After a year of OS/360 programming, I was manager of the PDP-11/50 and the DEC-20s (first e-mail, early networking, the first campuswide academic timesharing), then manager of "Systems Integration" (first microcomputers, PCs, Kermit), principal investigator of the "Hermit" distributed computing research project, then manager of Network Planning for the University and chair of the University-wide Network Planning Group, before "retiring" to the Kermit Project, which had less (well, zero) meetings and way more fun. I was laid off from Columbia in 2011 but still have access to this website. (Note: the Columbia Kermit Project website was cancelled and its website frozen July 1, 2011; the new Open Source Kermit Project website is HERE.)

Capsule Summary

Disclaimers

Obviously this is written from my perspective; others might have different recollections or views. In particular, at least after 1963, this turns out to be more a history of centralized academic computing, rather than all computing, at Columbia, giving short shrift to the departments, administrative computing, the libraries, and the outlying campuses; a more complete history needs these perspectives too. I've made every attempt to check the facts; any remaining errors are mine -- please feel free to point them out. Computers are value-neutral tools that can be used for good or evil, and it is clear that from the very beginning they have been used for both. This document does not aim to extol the virtues of computers in general, nor of any particular company that makes them, but only to chronicle their use at Columbia University.

Acknowledgements

Automatic computing at Columbia University got off to a serious start in the 1920s in the with the installation of large IBM accounting and calculating machines in the Statistics and Astronomy departments and a close relationship that developed with IBM that would last 50 years. Columbia soon developed a world-class reputation for innovation in scientific computing . As World War II approached, Columbia astronomy professor Wallace Eckert was recruited by the US Naval Observatory to apply the techniques he had developed at Columbia to the production of the almanacs that guided air and sea navigation throughout the war. At the end of the war Eckert rejoined Columbia as the founder and director of IBM Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory on 116th Street, IBM's first pure research facility, which also served as Columbia's "computer center," and created the world's first Computer Science curriculum . Several groundbreaking early computers were designed and/or built at Watson Lab. In 1963 Columbia opened its own Computer Center on campus underneath the Business School. From 1963 to 1975 all computing at Columbia was done on large central IBM mainframes , with a handful of smaller computers in the departments. Jobs were coded on punched cards and run by operators in the Computer Center machine room. In 1973 a public Self-Service Input/Output area (SSIO) was opened with key punches, card readers, and printers where users could submit jobs and retrieve the results themselves. Beginning in 1975 interactive timesharing was introduced based on central Digital Equipment Corporation computers with public hardcopy and video terminals installed in the SSIO area and in the Engineering building. Other terminal rooms were added over time, mainly in the dormitories . During 1977-80 a lively online community developed, with email, bulletin boards, and file sharing, while courses increasingly required the use of the central computers, or took advantage of them in other ways. In the 1980s public terminals were gradually replaced by microcomputers, PCs, and workstations connected to the central computers through their serial ports, like terminals. Columbia joined the ARPANET (later to become the Internet) in 1984. The terminal network was replaced in stages by Ethernet, which was also extended to dormitory rooms, offices, and even apartments. About 1995 the combination of Windows 95 and the World Wide Web led to widespread migration from centralized timesharing to distributed desktop computing, wired and then increasingly wireless. Students began to arrive with their own computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices; the need for public PC labs dwindled. By 2005 or so, the Computer Center merely provided the infrastructure, mainly the network, e-classrooms, and email. Now even email has been outsourced

I was inspired by Bruce Gilchrist's Forty Years of Computing article from 1981 [3] (so that makes it sixty seventy 79 years!)

Special thanks to Bruce Gilchrist and Nuala Hallinan, each of whom contributed valuable archive material and considerable time, effort, and miles to this project; to Herb Grosch for his awesome book as well as tons of new information, corrections, insights, anecdotes, and artifacts; to Eric Hankam for the loan of his personal archive of photos and materials, his autobiography, and a wealth of Watson Lab recollections; to Charlotte Moseley for preserving and contributing a large number of old IBM manuals; and to Bob Resnikoff who unearthed his long-lost cache of 1980 machine-room and MSS photos. Herb, in particular, was involved in this project on a daily basis since he first happened upon it in May 2003 until shortly before his death at 91 in January 2010. Herb remembered everything.

And thanks to the editors of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing for an announcement and abstract of this site in their April-June 2002 issue, and for announcing the online version of Herb Grosch's book in the July-September 2003 issue.

Please report any broken links directly to the author.

[ Introduction ] [ Timeline ] [ Epilog ] [ Tables ] [ Acronyms ] [ Glossary ] [ Sources ] [ Links ] [ SEARCH ] [ FAQ ]

Introduction

At the dawn of the new Millenium, computers and the network are ubiquitous; we can't live without them. It wasn't always so. How did we get here? A series of technological innovations including Pascal's adder (the Pascaline, 1600s), Leibnitz's multiplier (the Stepped Reckoner, about 1700), the Jacquard loom (1804), the Babbage Analytical and Difference Engines (1820s-30s), electricity and electromagnetism, the telegraph, the Hollerith tabulating machine (1890), the relay, the vacuum tube, core memory, the transistor, the laser, the integrated circuit, and on and on, each resulted in products that stimulated applications, which in turn stimulated the demand for more and better products, and before long computers entered the economy and the popular culture.

A case can be made that the computer industry got its start at Columbia University in the late 1920s and early 1930s when Professors Wood and Eckert, to advance their respective sciences, began to send designs and specifications for computing machines to IBM Corporation, which until then had been a maker of punched-card tabulating machines for the business market. From those days through the 1980s, the relationship of Columbia with companies like IBM was symbiotic and fruitful (and continues on a smaller scale to this day, mainly in the Physics department with the construction of massively parallel supercomputers -- who else would know how to connect 512 processors in a 6-dimension mesh with the topology of a torus?) IBM Corporation itself was the child of Columbian Herman Hollerith.

The early days of invention and innovation are past. Computers and networks are now well established in the daily lives of vast numbers of people in many nations, and certainly at Columbia University. Today's computers are off-the-shelf mass-market consumer appliances, which was perhaps inevitable and is no doubt a good thing in some ways. How this came about is a story told elsewhere but as you'll see below, some important parts of it happened right here.

[ Introduction ] [ Timeline ] [ Epilog ] [ Tables ] [ Acronyms ] [ Glossary ] [ Sources ] [ Links ] [ SEARCH ] [ FAQ ]

Timeline

The story of computing at Columbia is presented chronologically. Most links are to local documents, and therefore will work as long as all the files accompanying this document are kept together. There are also a few relatively unimportant external links, which are bound to go bad sooner or later -- such is the Web.

1924-26: The Columbia University Statistical Laboratory (location unknown) includes Hollerith tabulating, punching, and sorting machines, Burroughs adding machines, Brunsviga and Millionaire calculators (the latter was the first device to perform direct multiplication), plus reference works such as math and statistical tables. Prof. Robert E. Chaddock (Statistics Dept) was in charge. The Astronomy department (Prof. H. Jacoby) still has the "five computing machines" [5]. CLICK HERE for a gallery of late-1920s computing machines. CLICK HERE for a 1926 aerial view of Columbia University. CLICK HERE for a 1925 Columbia University map. 1926: Wallace Eckert (1902-1971) joins Columbia's Astronomy faculty, specializing in celestial mechanics and most especially the moon. In pursuit of these interests, Eckert is to become a true computer pioneer. 1928: Benjamin Wood (1894-1986), head of the University Bureau of Collegiate Educational Research [5], proposes to Thomas J. Watson Sr., president of IBM, a method for automated scoring of examination papers in large-scale testing programs (which previously involved "acres of girls trying to tabulate ... test results" [45]). After some discussion, Watson sent three truckloads of tabulating, card-punching, sorting, and accessory equipment to the basement of Hamilton Hall [9,40]. 1928: Meanwhile in England, L.J. Comrie (1893-1950), Superintendant of H.M. Nautical Almanac Office, begins a project to calculate future positions of the moon using punched cards, a sorter, a tabulator, and a duplicating punch, in what is probably the first use of these machines for scientific calculation [72]. This work would shortly inspire Columbia's Wallace Eckert to take the next historic step: automating these calculations. As we will see, much of the impetus towards automated scientific computation (and therefore modern computers) came from astronomers, and its primary application was in navigation. The same impetus brought us accurate, portable timepieces in the previous century. 1928: Columbia's medical school, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, moves from 10th Avenue and 55th-60th Streets to Washington Heights between Broadway and Fort Washington Avenue, 165th-168th Streets, the former site of Hilltop Park (1903-1912), the baseball stadium of the New York Yankees (known as the New York Highlanders until 1912). Jun 1929: Prof. Wood's operation became the Columbia University Statistical Bureau (PHOTOS). In addition to tabulating test results, it served as a "computer center" for other academic departments, particularly the Dept of Astronomy, which used the equipment for "interpolating astronomical tables" [9,40].

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(The story of administrative computing prior to 1965 is still largely a mystery. Dorothy Marshall, VP for ADP, upon her retirement in 1988, wrote a reminiscence in the ADP Newsletter [11], where she recalls that "ADP actually originated in the Controller's Office, the first [administrative] department to use a punch-card system. The first large system ADP acquired is still with us -- the Alumni Records and Gift Information System (ARGIS) -- and I recall very clearly the accusations that we were using all the tape drives and all the system resources at the expense of the University researchers." (This was to be a recurring theme.) Unfortunately Dorothy did not mention dates or places.)

(Coincidentally, some clue was provided on the front page of the Columbia University website, 18 Jan 2001, and subsequent University Record article [18] announcing the retirement of Joe Sulsona, shift supervisor of the Computer Center machine room, after 42 years: "Sulsona, a New York City native, went from high school directly to the military. When he returned from Korea in 1957 at the age of 23, he studied the latest in computing, gaining experience as a board programmer, which involved the manipulation of wires and plugs on a computer board, much like the original telephone operating systems. He was hired at Columbia's alumni faculty records office as a machine operator and spent his time punching out data cards using a small keypunch machine.")

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(Newsletters of the early 70s were devoted mainly to JCL hints and tips, announcements of meetings and conferences, announcements of OS/360 upgrades, explanations of cost accounting, and lists of unclaimed tapes in the tape library -- up to 6 pages of numeric tape IDs on one occasion (in the Earth Week issue no less: V6#5, 15 Apr 1971) -- plus the annual April Fools Issue, usually featuring parodies of cost accounting. Prior to 1971, they also contained abstracts or reports of research projects, e.g. "Motivating Learning in Interracial Situations" (V5#2); "French Business Elite Study", Jonathan Cole et al; "Transport and Fluid Mechanics in Artificial Organs", Ed Leonard et al (V5#13); as well as Computer Science Colloquia.)

Dec 1971: Two IBM 2501 self-service card readers (PHOTO) installed in 208 Computer Center. "The use of self-service card readers affords CUCC users much greater security for their decks at both the submission and the retrieval points of running a job. Users will be able to read in their own decks and keep them while the job is running -- thereby eliminating the risk of loss or mishandling of the deck by the Center. Also, since input decks no longer need be left in the output bins, the exposure of users' JOB cards -- and therefore their project numbers -- to anauthorized persons [some things never change] will be significantly reduced. In addition to this increased security, the 2501's will also provide greater efficiency since the user will be able to discover and correct immediately such problems as off-punched cards [hanging and pregnant chad were evidently not an issue in 1971], rather than having to wait for the job to be processed by the Center." (V6#year19) Also on the second floor was an IBM 360 Model 20 used for printing card decks onto fanfold paper, duplicating card decks, and so on; the desired function could be selected with a dial. There was (and had been for some time) a key punch room on the first floor. Later the Model 20 was moved to the key punch room. Apr 1972: TPMON installed, allows terminal lines to be switched among different applications such as Wylbur (and what else?) rather than dedicated to a specific one. Sep 1972: IBM OS/360 21.0 installed (V6#33). 1973: The following was posted by Arthur T. Murray on alt.folklore.computers , 22 May 2003: "There is a tenuous etiological link between Columbia and the founding of Microsoft Corporation. Here in Seattle WA USA, a Columbia Ph.D. grad in astronomy, Dr. James R. Naiden -- now in his late eighties -- around 1973 was teaching Latin at The Lakeside School. 'Doc' Naiden observed that the students were eager to get into computers, so he asked (Naiden was always starting things, e.g., he hired Vilem Sokol to run the Seattle Youth Symphony for many years; he also started a history-of-literature or some such group, still allegedly running at the University of Washington) the Lakeside Mothers Club to donate some money from their annual Lakeside Rummage Sale to buying some computer time-share for the kids -- back then there were no personal computers. The Mothers put up one thousand dollars, which Bill Gates and Paul Allen ran through in a matter of weeks. Upshot: Columbia >> Doc Naiden >> Lakeside School >> Microsoft Corp." Jan 1973: V6#46 mentions twenty-five IBM 2741 terminals being replaced by (presumably compatible) Anderson-Jacobson 841 terminals, which were cheaper to rent ($88 versus $100 per month). Feb 1973: The Self-Service Input/Output (SSIO) Area (PHOTO GALLERY) is opened on the first floor of the Computer Center building. Equipment included two card readers, two IBM 1403 printers, one online card punch (NEED PHOTO), a sorter, a collator, an interpreter, a duplicator, four Hazeltine 2000 user terminals, and one job inquiry console -- all "self service" -- plus a large number of IBM 029 key punches, and a resident "Insultant" whom I remember well from my student days. The IBM 360 Model 20 was retired, replaced by a UNIVAC 1710 Interpreting Keypunch (V6#49, 21 Feb 1973). Now, for the first time, users could not only submit their own jobs but also get the results themselves as soon as the job had run. Sometimes, standing in line at the card readers, were social scientists with "data sets" spanning 4 or 5 boxes of cards (2000 cards per box); submitting jobs of this size rarely proceeded without incident (jams, dropped decks). The normal student Open Batch job deck was a quarter inch thick and generally went through the system quickly. A Hazeltine 2000 ASP Job Inquiry station let you watch your job rise through the queue so you could elbow your way through the crowd to the printer when your job output started. Every night from 7 to 9pm was "System Time", meaning the Systems Group from Watson Lab had the 360/91 to themselves and the readers and printers were shut down. The SSIO area was a miserable place during those two hours. More about SSIO HERE. More about self-service computing just below in the entry for Sep 1973. 22 May 1973: Birth of Ethernet (a local area networking technology that would reach Columbia in the early 1980s and persist for decades), developed by Bob Metcalfe of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which also gave us the graphical user interface and desktop metaphor. May 1973: Resignation of Joe Gianotti (Assistant Director), Ira Fuchs (systems programmer, who would go on to direct the CUNY facility and to found BITNET, become President of CREN, etc.), Aron Eisenpress, Ben Yalow, and other members of the Systems group, to join Ken King at CUNY, which was acquiring brand-new then-leading-edge IBM 370/168 hardware (V6#54). Soon more would follow. May 1973: Dr. Bruce Gilchrist is appointed the new Director of the Columbia University Computer Center (he would assume full-time duties in July). He also receives an appointment to the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Bruce was a co-inventor of the fast adder while at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study (1955), then Director of Computing at the University of Syracuse (mid-to-late 1950s), joined IBM in 1959 and became manager of IBM's Service Bureau and Data Processing divisions (1963-68). While at IBM Bruce was Secretary and then Vice President of the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM (1960-64), and afterwards was President and Executive Director of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, AFIPS (1968-73). His final project at Columbia was the installation of the $20-million-dollar IBM/Rolm Computerized Branch Exchange, not just the University's first digital telephone system, but also the way that almost every single room (inclusing in dormitories) on the Morningside campus got high-speed data access. Sep 1973: Bruce introduced the Open Batch system (V6#60), opening up "The Computer" to the masses for the first time, and renamed CUCC (Columbia University Computer Center) to CUCCA (Columbia University Center for Computing Activities), in recognition that computing was beginning to take place outside the machine room. SSIO soon became unbelievably crowded. Oct 1973: The IBM 1410 is removed [19]. 1974: Snapshot: When I came to the CUCCA Systems Group in 1974, Dr. Howard Eskin was manager of Systems (197?-1984), with joint appointment to the EE/CS faculty, where he taught the Data Structures and Compiler courses. The big languages for systems programming then were 360 assembler, APL, PL/I and SPITBOL (a SNOBOL dialect). CUCCA included both academic and administrative computing under a single director, all in the Watson building at 612 W 115th Street. Administrative computing (ADP) shared floors 2-5 with the Purchasing Office; the Director's office and administrative was staff on 6, academic on 7-8. Offices had chalkboards for scribbling ideas and diagrams. The Systems Group (where I worked) was on the 7th floor, 2-3 people to a room, each room with a single shared Hazeltine terminal, connected at 1200 bps to a multiplexer in the back of 7 that was connected by leased telephone line to the 3705 in the machine room, and that always conked out on rainy days. There was no e-mail. The Penthouse was a kind of cafeteria, with tables and chairs (I remember checkered tablecloths and gingham curtains) and a working, if rarely-used, kitchen. The back of the first floor was a large classroom (now divided into the network and mail rooms); across from the elevator was a big Xerox copying room (Joe Iglesias), and there was a grand lobby and reception area, approximately where the "art gallery" is now, plus some administrative offices (Helen Ransower). There was a shower in the basement (later converted to a darkroom by Andy Koenig, and later to a weight-lifting room by Lloyd, the messenger/front-desk guy, an Olympic hopeful). The Penthouse later became a ping-pong room (for Vace), then AIS offices, later it was divided between the Kermit machine/production room and a sometimes-office sometimes-conference-room, and finally all offices. The back of the 7th floor was an IBM machine room dating from the 1950s, complete with raised floor, "space phone" floor-tile pullers, and communication cables radiating out to all the offices. The famous 1957 book about IBM, Think [8], speaks of teak paneling and cozy fireplaces, but those were in the first Watson Lab, not this one. In those days, the Computer Center had a certain academic standing not only through faculty appointments, but also for its R&D activities and library. The non-circulating research library (not to be confused with the Thomas J Watson Library of the Business School) in room 209 of the Computer Center Building was a full-fledged branch of the Columbia Library, complete with card catalog and librarian (the original librarians were Julia Jann and Hugh Seidman; Nuala Hallinan [20] was librarian from 1966 to 1973, succeeded by Evelyn Gorham). The holdings, cataloged in Butler Library, included computer science books and journals as well as computer manuals and Computer Center handouts [25]. New acquisitions continued until at least 1973. Eventually (about 1980) the collection was transferred to the Engineering Library. Several technical staff members performed pure R&D, for example Richard Siegler who worked half-time on an AI medical diagnosis assistant in SPITBOL with Dr. Rifkin at the Medical Center. An annual catalog, the Columbia University Bulletin, Computing Activities [7] was published, as well as a Technical Abstract of each year's research projects. CUCCA was co-sponsor (with EE/CS) of the University Colloquium in Computer Science. There was an alliance with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on 112th Street (Tom's Restaurant building), which had one of the four existing IBM 360/95s. The academic user community was quite small. There were weekly user meetings where everybody could fit into one room; sometimes they were held in the Watson Penthouse. 1974-78: Heyday of Wylbur, and the age of the Hazeltine 2000 video terminal mainly on Olympus (aside from four Hazeltines available to users in 208 Computer Center: V6#22). Wylbur was an interactive linemode editor that could be used from a hardcopy or video terminal. It was far more than an editor, however; it was the equivalent of the latter-day "shell"; users lived in Wylbur all day, writing Wylbur execs (like shell scripts), programs, and JCL; submitting jobs, querying jobs, sending screen messages (but not e-mail) to each other, and so on. Wylbur originally came from Stanford but was improved beyond recognition by Dave Marcus and later Vace Kundakci, who also converted it to TSO and later to VM/CMS. It's still used today on our IBM mainframes, but unfortunately we could never export it due to licensing issues. Eventually Wylbur terminals -- hardwired to the 3705 -- were available to departments; sometimes these were video terminals, sometimes IBM 2741 (IBM hardcopy terminals made from Selectric typewriters).

When developing software on the mainframe, writing in assembler, Fortran, PL/I, etc (compiled, not interpreted, languages), programs would often "dump core" because of faulty instructions (bugs, mistakes). In those days, a core dump meant a literal dump of literal core memory to the printer, in hex, sometimes several feet thick. To find the fault, programmers would have to decode the core dump from the listing by hand, separating instructions, addresses, and data -- a lost art (and good riddance!) When the DEC-20s arrived on the scene, it became possible to analyze and debug core images (and even running programs) interactively and symbolically with a tool called (what else) DDT, and debugging tasks that once took days or weeks became quick and even fun. DDT-like tools live on today in Unix as 'adb' and 'gdb'.

May 1974: Snapshot: Wylbur has 500 users. CALL/360 has 50-100 users. There are 2000 batch users. 50% of each programmer's time is spent helping users. ADP submits 10% of the batch jobs but uses 50% of the machine. Because of their EAM backgrounds, the Registrar's and Controller's Offices consider the 360/91 a "large sorter". 90% of billing is for funny money. Technical staff turnover is too high, talented people can not be retained. [33] 1974-75: First "proof of concept" home computers introduced (Mark-8, Altair). 1975: IBM 3705 communications front end replaced by an NCR COMTEN (which lasted until August 1998), after a two-week training course in the Watson Lab classroom in the back of the 1st floor. Jul 1975: A DEC PDP-11/50 minicomputer (PHOTOS) was installed, running the RSTS/E timesharing system (we considered UNIX, but it was not nearly ready for large-scale production use in a hostile environment). This was the first true general-purpose public-access timesharing system (not counting APL and CALL/OS (aka CALL/360), which were both OS/360 subsystems (essentially batch jobs, each of which controlled a number of terminals simultaneously); the latter was only for the Business School and APL, though open to the public, required special terminals which were not to be found in abundance, and was not exactly user friendly). RSTS/E was to be a small pilot project to absorb the CALL/OS users and attract new ones. 32 people could use it at a time (because it had 32 terminals). Accounts were free. Within a few months of installation, it was already logging nearly ten times the usage that CALL/OS had at its peak [19]. (From "Bandit", 6 July 2010) CALL/360 was written for Buck Rogers of IBM by seven guys who had worked together at GE in Phoenix, then moved to the San Jose Bay Area. They wrote CALL/360 for a fixed-price, 10 month contract. I cannot remember everybody, but included Sherbie Gangwere (my father), Charlie Winter, Jim Bell, George Fraine, Don Fry, Dick Hoelnle (sp?) and ??? (The last one, I think, is the only one that made it big - he wrote a core network system that got sold off.) Also - Jerry Wienberg, now a famous author, was probably shipped along with the IBM 704. He was sent with the first 10 machines, and taught many how to program it. The primary programming language (like in CALL/OS) was BASIC (another reason why RSTS was chosen over UNIX, which didn't have BASIC), but Fortran and Macro-11 were also available. As I recall, the PDP-11/50 cost about $150,000. It occupied a fairly large room (208) in the Computer Center down the hall from the IBM machine room, and was comprised of four full-width cabinets (CPU, tape drive, communications, I forget what else) and a 92MB RP04 3330-type disk drive, plus a 2K fixed-head drive for swapping (RS04?). I took care of it myself (backups and all) for maybe a year, then Ben Beecher joined me and later also some part-timers. Ben and I sat in the room with it full-time for a couple years. Our terminals were DECwriters (later VT05, VT50, VT52, and finally VT100, and at one point a GE Terminet, that worked and sounded like a bandsaw). But even without the Terminet, the room was so loud we had to wear airport ear-protectors. Ben was RSTS manager after the DEC-20s came in 1977. Eventually RSTS had a user population of 1700. It was retired in 1982. Jul 1975: The IBM 1410 in the Controller's Office is replaced by an IBM 370/115 [19]. Mid 1970s: Here begins the decline of centralized campus computing. Minicomputers begin to sprout in the departments, encouraged by government grants that would buy equipment but wouldn't pay for central computer time. (The same trend was evident at other universities; it created the need for campus networking, and thus -- since a way was needed to interconnect all these campus networks -- the Internet.) Some of the early departmental minis I remember were the SEL 810B, Applied Physics also had an Imlac graphics processor (which never worked) and several early PDP-8 models for controlling experiments. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I worked in Applied Physics and used the departmental computers for both work and EE/CS projects. The SEL (Systems Engineering Laboratories, later Gould) 810B (1968) was the most advanced, since it had i/o devices and could be programmed in Fortran and assembly language. It had 16K of memory, 2 registers, Teletype, paper tape, card reader, drum printer, and an oscilloscope-like CRT display for graphics; CLICK HERE to see a picture of the SEL 810A, which is like the 810B but without extra i/o devices. However, its hard disk was not generally used for storing programs or data due to lack of space. Instead, programs were read from cards or paper tape; this required toggling in a bootstrap program on the console switches: a series of 16-bit words was deposited in successive memory locations and then executed to activate the Teletype as the control device, which could be used in turn to activate the card or paper tape reader to read the program. Production programs were generally punched in object format onto paper tape (since the paper tape reader/punch was much faster than the card reader). CLICK HERE to see the SEL 810B Manual. The PDP-8 computers in the same lab had no Teletype, card reader, or paper tape; they were programmed directly from the console switches and i/o was magtape only. The Physics Department in Pupin Hall had a DEC PDP-4, several PDP-8s, a PDP-9, and a PDP-15; Electrical Engineering had a PDP-7 on the 12th floor of Mudd, that we studied down to the gate level in the 1970s EE/CS Computer Architecture course. (The PDP-7 is also the machine for which the UNIX operating was originally written at Bell Labs in the late 1960s.) The keypunch room was on the 2nd floor of Engineering Terrace near the back exit, connected by tunnel to the SSIO area. There were often long waits for punches. The 1976 Bulletin [7] also lists: A DEC PDP-11/45 and GT/40 Graphics Computer in Biology (Schermerhorn).

A HP 2100 in Chemical Engineering (Prentis).

A DG Nova 1220 and 3 DEC PDP-8s in Chemistry (Havemeyer).

A DG Super Nova in EE/CS (Mudd). plus various special-purpose computers for Fourier transforms, etc, some of them possibly analog (rather than digital) on campus, as well as all sorts of computing equipment at the outlying campuses (no doubt a tale in itself). 1976: Andy Koenig's RSTS e-mail program, the first e-mail at CU. Andy was a prominent member of the CUCCA technical staff (reponsible for at least APL and PL/I) who went on to Bell Labs and fame with C++. His dad is Dr. Seymour H. Koenig, who was at Watson Lab from 1952 to 1970, and its director from 1967 [9,17]. Andy's frequent co-author is Barbaro Moo, also formerly of CUCCA. (Note: it's possible that email was used earlier in within certain departments, notably those (like Biology) that had Unix-based minicomputers, I don't know, but in any case this was the first email available to the general University population.) Nowadays most of the University conducts its business by e-mail, and it has been an enormous productivity booster, eliminating telephone tag, enabling one-to-many messaging, and filling an ever-increasing role in instruction and research. As early as 1983 (the 9 Feb 1983 Newsletter, V15#2, is full of allusions to this), professors were sending assignments to their classes by e-mail and collecting results the same way, with the added benefit of questions and answers and other discussions that could not fit in the classroom schedule. Readers who were not exposed to electronic mail prior to the Internet explosion of the mid-1990s probably won't appreciate how much more useful and pleasant it was before then, even in its original text-only format. Today I typically have several hundred messages waiting for me each morning (after central filtering!), of which 98% are spam, advertisements, promotions, junk mail, get-rich-quick schemes, invitations to Exclusive High-Powered Executive Webcasts and Enterprise Leadership Webinars, chain letters, be-my-friend-and-share-photos, inspirational Powerpoints, strategic partnerships, "office humor", world class enterprise solutions, body-part enhancements, business best practices, claim your lottery winnings, claim your inheritance, claim your fund, "Dear beloved", "I am dying, I don't want you to feel sorry for me", "Beloved in Christ", "Dear beneficiary", "Complements of the season", confidential matter, delinquent accounts, cash grant award, designer watches, investment opportunities, work-at-home opportunities, get your diploma, grow your business, increase your profitability, "Dear entrepreneur", "Take this five-minute survey", offers from soldiers in our many wars who found barrels full of money, "I want to place an order with your store", low-interest loans, "your account is expired", Viagra, Cialis, lonely hearts, Russian beauties, "update your information", bounce notifications about mail you didn't send, and deliberate attempts at implanting viruses (Windows e-mail attachments containing viruses or worms have no effect on my UNIX-based plain-text mail client) -- or security alerts or complaints about all of these. In the 1970s and 80s, by contrast, practically every e-mail message was legitimate, worth reading, and usually only 1-2K bytes in length, and could not possibly hurt your computer (not strictly true; it was possible to put an escape sequence in an email message that, if it arrived intact at certain kinds of terminals, could make them automatically transmit any desired text back to the host, but even if you had a terminal that responded to the escape sequence, this rarely could cause any serious demage because an email client would be on the receiving end, not the system command prompt) . Even when e-mail is exchanged between consenting parties, the demands posed by multimedia attachments -- Microsoft Word documents, Powerpoints, spreadsheets, images, audio and video clips, even entire music CDs or motion pictures -- have coerced the University to constantly upgrade its network and mail server capacity, and of course the costs are inevitably passed back to the consumer in the form of tuition or overhead increases and/or cutbacks in other areas. 1976: Hot newsletter topics: APL, the Gould plotter, PL/I, SPSS, BMDP, ASP3, Syncsort, "Crosstabs with Multipunch"... Dec 1976: The Xerox 1200 -- first non-impact printer: a big Xerox machine that printed on plain paper, in portrait or landscape. Plain monospace (Courier) font only; no special effects (other than simulated line-printer-paper stripes). I don't remember exactly where the input came from -- either it had an IBM mainframe channel connection, or else it read from 9-track magnetic tape, but in any case it was possible to print on it from both the IBM and DEC systems. 1977: (Month?) Because the IBM 360/91 was more suited to scientific calculations and lacked decimal arithmetic, and because of security questions posed by the Open Batch system, which opened it up to the student population, ADP acquires a separate mainframe exclusively for administrative work, an IBM 370/138 located in the Computer Center machine room and running VM/CMS (later to be upgraded to 370/148, 3031 (1979), 3083 (1983), 3090 (1986), etc). A new Personnel (now we would say "Human Resources") system was developed for the 370 in house, and administrative applications began to migrate from punch cards and batch to interactive online systems [20]. The arrival of the IBM 370 launches an effort to convert administrative applications from batch to online, with IBM 3270 block-mode terminals allowing interactive access to administrative systems such as student records, accounts receivable, and so on. Jul 1977: The IBM 370/115 in the Controller's Office is removed. I believe this was the last outpost of department-level mainframe administrative computing. Jul 1977: The blackout of 1977. No electricity for two days (July 13-14). Howard (Eskin) and I were in Watson Lab the evening of the 13th working on the floor plan for the 272A Engineering Terrace terminal room when the lights went out. We were also in the middle of our first DEC-20 installation, a six-week process (so two lost days were not a disaster). Aug 1977: Our PDP-11/50 was invaded (via modem) by a gang of prep-school kids, who had their way with it undetected for several weeks. This was the first hacker breakin to a Columbia computer from the outside, and it went to court. It cost us nearly a week of round-the-clock systems work and delayed the DEC-20 opening by a week. Later the same group invaded other RSTS systems and even (as I recall) destroyed a cement company in Quebec. The prep school in question had purchased a PDP-11 with RSTS and let the students run it without supervision; thus the students had hands-on access and full privileges, with ample opportunity to probe their own system for vulnerabilities, write Trojan-horse replacements for system software, etc, in-house before attacking external sites, and indeed they did a good job: their modified LOGIN program let them in silently, with full "root" privileges; the modified accounting programs did not list their sessions; the modified DIRECTORY program did not list their directories or files; the modified SYSTAT program did not show their jobs, and so on. Eventually they tipped their hand by accidentally printing a password list on a public printer, and we tracked them down using methods remarkably similar to those used by Cliff Stoll 10 years later to catch the German hackers at Berkeley [46] (see 1986-87 below), such as Y-connecting hardcopy terminals to the modems to log dialin sessions. Aug 1977: Our first DECSYSTEM-20, CU20A (PHOTOS), was installed for large-scale timesharing. Accounts were free and available to all (or maybe there was a one-time $5.00 fee; later, per-semester or per-course fees would be added). It cost 800,000 dollars [19] and was much larger than the PDP-11, a row of double-width orange cabinets about 10 feet long, plus four 178MB RP06 washing-machine-size 3350-type disk drives, but unlike the PDP-11, had little in the way of lights and switches (if you didn't count the PDP-11/40 communications front end hidden inside it). It had 256K 36-bit words of main memory, two 800/1600bpi TU45 tape drives (later TU77, TU78), an LP20 drum printer (mainly for backup listings), and an LA36 system console hardcopy terminal. It also had a DN20 communications processor (PDP-11/34 concealed in orange full-size cabinet) for remote job entry (see Glossary) to the IBM mainframes. CU20A was originally a model 2040, and so it had core memory and no cache; later it was upgraded to a 2050 and then a 2065; the core became MOS and cache was added, memory increased to 2MB. Each user got 35KB (that's KB, not MB or GB) of disk space. The first DEC-20 marked the beginning of the "online campus" in which the computer was used not just for calcalation and programming, but also communication among users and (eventually) with the outside world. The DEC-20 was a member of the DEC's 36-bit PDP-10 line of computers, which descended from the PDP-6, first produced in 1964, and which itself has its roots in the 36-bit IBM 700 series that goes back to 1952. PDP-10s, however, were distinct from 20s: they had a different operating system (TOPS-10 instead of TOPS-20); they came in a variety of models (KA, KI, KL, KS), whereas DEC-20s came in only KL and KS models; PDP-10s were more suited to hands-on lab work, with all sorts of devices and attachments lacking from the -20s such as real-time bus-attached instruments; DECtapes, paper tape, and graphics devices; they could be installed in multiprocessor configurations; and they were blue rather than orange. DEC-20s could run TOPS-10 applications in an "emulation mode", but not vice versa, and until the very end, quite a bit of DEC-20 software was indeed native to TOPS-10 (e.g. the linker and most of the compilers). The DEC-20 pioneered all sorts of advanced concepts such as a swappable monitor (kernel), lightweight processes (threads), page mapping, shared pages with copy-on-write, hardware assisted paging, and other techniques to allow large numbers of users access to a limited resource (CLICK HERE for details). Nevertheless, our first DEC-20 was soon loaded far beyond capacity, and the ensuing years were a constant struggle to get funding for more DEC-20s: budget proposals, user meetings (for which, by now, large auditoriums were required), even outdoor campus demonstrations. But DEC-20s were expensive; they demanded copious floor space and air conditioning, as well as 3-phase power with isolated ground (a 10-foot copper stake literally driven into bedrock outside the CUCCA loading dock). Annual maintenance alone was something like $100,000 per machine, and each one carried an additional $10,000 electric bill. Therefore adding DEC-20s was difficult and painful. There were all sorts of revenue-raising schemes and eventually we had 4 of them, CU20A through CU20D, serving 6000 users, up to 70 or 80 logged in simultaneously on each. Additional DEC-20s for instruction and research were installed at Teachers College and in the Computer Science department. DEC-20s were fairly reliable for their day. Unlike the IBM mainframe with its scheduled two-hour nightly System Time, the DEC-20s were kept running and available all the time except for a couple hours (usually outside of prime time) every week or two for "preventive maintenance" by DEC Field Service. But by today's standards they crashed frequently anyway, usually because of power glitches; so often, in fact that somebody had a batch of %DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING T-shirts made up (this was the dying gasp of the DEC-20 as it went down). Whenever a DEC-20 was up for more than 100 hours, people became quite excited. The record was just shy of 800 hours (about a month); MTBF was under 100 hours (4 days). By comparison, today (8 Feb 2001) I have an HP workstation in my office that has been up continuously for 883 days (that's more than 21,000 hours), despite numerous brownouts and momentary power failures, and that's without a UPS (eventually its running streak was interrupted at 900-some days when electricians needed to shut off power to the floor to replace the circuit-breaker panel). For lots more about the Columbia DEC-20s, CLICK HERE.

(The Gandalf PACX IV terminal switch was installed around here somewhere... Prior to that terminals were hardwired using various forgotten technologies like 20mA Current Loop. The PACX was a speed-transparent 1000x1000 switch, driven by little blue "PACX boxes" on the user end, with thumbwheels to dial the desired service and an on/off switch.)

1977-78: Use of e-mail takes off. Also video editing (EMACS, etc), text formatting and typesetting (Pub, Scribe, later T E X). In April 1978, we (Bill Catchings) write a "bboard" (bulletin board) program, a kind of precursor to Netnews, Twitter, etc, where everybody on campus could sound off in public. Various bboards were available, including course-specific boards, topical boards, and a "general" (any topic) board, and were unmoderated and uncensored. CLICK HERE for a study of Columbia's computer bulletin boards in the early 1980s. EMACS, by the way, was created at the MIT AI Lab on a PDP-10 running MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) by Richard Stallman, building upon the venerable Text Editor and COrrector, TECO, written in 1962-63 for the DEC PDP-1 by Dan Murphy, who was also largely responsible for TOPS-20, the operating system on our DECSYSTEM-20s. I first used TECO in 1972 on a PDP-11/20 with the DOS/Batch operating, at the Teletype console. The first release of EMACS was in 1976 and we were using it at Columbia on CU20A by 1977. Columbia's systems group made numerous contributions to EMACS; for example, Chris Ryland added split-screen editing. In the 1980s EMACS would be completely rewritten in LISP, to become the now-universal GNU EMACS, one of the most prominent surviving relics of the heyday of the DEC 36-bit mainframes. Jan 1978: The 272A Engineering Terrace terminal room opens (V10#2). This was the first public terminal room outside the Computer Center building. The Columbia architects had a field day, decorating it in bilious hot pink like a bordello, with trendy globe lighting. (The April Fools 1978 issue of the Newsletter (V10#5) presents the "coveted Louis XVI Alive with the Arts" award to the Department of Buildings and Grounds [now Facilities Management] for "their exceptional work in recreating the atmosphere of an 18th century French palace. ... Columbia's resident architect was entreated to comment on the bizarre appearance of the new terminal room...") Notwithstanding the decor, the room was laid out according to our floorplan (Howard Eskin and I designed it), divided into cubicles about 4 feet high so people would have privacy when sitting, but could stand up to chat and hand things back and forth. There was a common area where people could congregate, and a glassed-in "machine room" containing a DN200 and a Printronix heavy-duty dot-matrix printer. Each cubicle had a terminal and a spacious working surface for books and papers and its own reading light. Large cubicles had LA36 DECwriters (hard-copy 132-column dot-matrix printers operating at 30 cps on pin-feed green-and-white striped fanfold paper) and the smaller ones had Perkin-Elmer Fox-1100 CRTs operating at 9600 bps (this was the first affordable CRT, costing about $500, compared to most others that cost a thousand dollars and up). Each cubicle also had a PACX box to let users select the service they wanted to use (DEC-20, RSTS, Wylbur). Eventually the lab was re-architected, expanded, and . . . REDECORATED. Too bad if you missed it (does anybody have a color photo of the original?) Mar 1978: APL conversion from IBM to DEC-20 was a big topic for many months. Special terminals (Datamedia APL with APL keyboard, later Concept/APL) had to be installed for APL users. To further encourage IBM to DEC migration, I wrote a mini-Wylbur ("Otto") for the DEC-20; Joel and his brother worked on a full Wylbur implementation for some time but it's not done yet. Apr 1978: The CUCCA Telephone Directory and Consulting Schedule. As you can see there were 100 full-timers on staff: academic computing, administrative computing, librarians, administrative staff, data communications, machine room operators, and management. Compared to 15 in 1965 and over 300 in 2010. Note too that in those days the technical staff helped users in person in three locations (two in SSIO, one in Mudd) and at other times they answered calls from users on their own phones — no call processing, no screening, no trouble tickets, no hiding behind web pages, no bureacracy. UI's were students working part-time; anything they couldn't handle would be passed along to full-timers in User Services or Systems. Many of the UI's listed on the schedule went on to become full timers and some even managers. (Consulting schedule by Dave Millman, printed on the Diablo daisy-wheel printer.) 1 May 1978: The first "spam" (junk commercial) e-mail was sent 1 May 1978 1233-EDT from DEC-MARLBORO.ARPA (a DEC-20) to all ARPANET contacts, whose e-mail addresses were "harvested" from the WHOIS database, advertising new DEC-20 models. More about this HERE. May 1978: OS/360 21.8 (which was released by IBM in 1970) installed on the IBM 360/91. Eight years in the making! The ex-CUCC systems people who defected to CUNY had to come back and teach nightly classes on OS/360 and what they had done to it (many things, including over 200 modifications for accounting and resource-limitation purposes) before their replacements could bring up the new release without fear of losing something vital. May 1978: Tektronix 4010 graphics a big topic in the newlsetters.

(Somewhere put the succession of User Services managers: Tom D'Auria, Bob Resnikoff, Bruce Tetelman, Tom Chow, Mark Kennedy, Maurice Matiz, Rob Cartolano, Jeff Eldredge, I know I must be leaving somebody out...) and SSIO (Marianne Clarke, Lois Dorman, Chris Gianone, ...) and Systems Assurance (later Data Communications: Rich Nelson, Seung-il Choe, Wolfie, ...) and CUCCA business managers (Peter Bujara, Neil Sachnoff, Patty Peters, Bob Bingham, Julie Lai...) About User Services, Maurice Matiz adds:

User Services existed only up to early in my era. After Vace's appointment and my appointment (I believe the only two managerial and higher level appointments that required a trying and complete interview by the whole University occurred in late 1989) did the groups that now define AcIS get created except that User Services comprised three groups. User Services stayed until Jeff Eldrege's group was spun out of my group, which had grown to over 25 people, in late 1994. (My diagramed proposal is dated 11/28/94.) At that time we changed names. Jeff's group became the Support Center and my group was renamed Academic Technologies. Also spun out at the time was what became EDS to report to Walter Bourne.

Dec 1978: First mention of UNIX by CUCCA in public (referring to the BSTJ UNIX issue [15]). V10#18. 1979: The Computer Science Department was created as a separate entity (previously it was part of the EE Dept) with Joseph Traub from CMU as Chair, and a $200,000 donation from IBM. Joe had been a Watson Fellow in Applied Mathematics in 1958-59 [9]. The Computer Science Building was constructed 1981-83 [12]. Before long a DECSYSTEM-20, several VAX-11/750s, and numerous workstations (early Suns and others) would be installed in the new CS facility. Jan 1979: Public terminals were available in SSIO (20), 272A Engineering Terrace (14), Furnald Lobby (4), 224 Butler (4), and Hartley Lobby (4). V11#2. Systems Assurance staff (Bob Galanos) would make the rounds on a daily basis to fix broken terminals, usually by replacing fuses taken out by students to "reserve" terminals for their own use. Feb 1979: Scribe, Diablo, printwheel lore dominates the Newsletter. Big business in printwheels. The Diablo was a typewriter-like terminal with a daisy-wheel print mechanism capable of proportional spacing, superscripts and subscripts, and even boldface (by doublestriking) and italics (by swapping printwheels). The CUCCA newsletter was printed on the Diablo for some years, and Diablos were deployed in public areas for users. Scribe included a Diablo driver, which produced .POD ("Prince Of Darkness") files for it, and we wrote software to "spool" these files to the Diablo itself, allowing pauses to change paper or printwheels. Printwheels were available in a variety of fonts and alphabets, but weren't cheap ($98 springs to mind). Aug 1979: COMND JSYS package written for SAIL (so we could write user-friendly programs for the DEC-20 in a high-level language). Andy Lowry and David Millman. Sep 1979: HP2621 industrial-strength video terminals installed in Mudd and elsewhere, including a new lab in Carman Hall. This was the face of CUCCA to our users; many of them thought the DEC-20s were made by HP. These are monochrome text terminals with good editing capabilties (for EMACS) and solidly built. Some had built-in thermal printers. A few units are still to be found here in good working order. 1979-80: Chris Ryland and I write a 200-plus-page guide to DEC-20 assembly-language programming. We were thinking of turning it into a book but Ralph Gorin of Stanford University beat us to it.

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1980 Photo Gallery: Machine room panorama.

IBM 4341s in situ.

The IBM Mass Storage System.

Tape Drives.

IBM Disk Farm. 1980: Instructional computing capacity badly needs expansion. At this point, CUCCA has three instructional systems: the IBM 360/91 Open Batch system (soon to be retired), the PDP-11/50 (fully saturated), and a single DECSYSTEM-20, CU20A, which is in constant demand and heavily overburdened. There is much gathering of statistics to understand usage patterns. In response to student and faculty demands, the Collery Committee (Arnold Collery was Dean of Columbia College) was appointed to make recommendations. The instructional computers were overloaded, but why? Was the new usage real or frivolous? A witch-hunt was launched against "text processing" (preparing papers on the computer, sending e-mail, etc). Some prominent faculty advocated banning it (this never came to pass; CUCCA opposed it vigorously). CPU and connect-time limits were to be instituted. Fees were to be increased. Various disincentives would be established against using the computers during "prime time." The tug of war between demand and resources is a persistent theme in academic computing. There has never been, and probably never will be, a clear linkage between demand and supply. Whenever resources (such as computer time, disk space, modems, network bandwidth) become scarce, as they always do, funding for expansion does not flow automatically (nor should it). First there is a demand for a precise accounting of how, for what, and by whom the current resources are being consumed, the gathering of which in turn taxes the resources still futher. Once the information is obtained, demands to flush out inappropriate use -- whose definition varies with the times (e.g. network capacity versus Napster in 2000) -- quickly follow. Of course instructional computing on the DEC-20s was true to this pattern. CU20A drove itself near to melting by accounting for itself. And then complicated limits were imposed on CPU time, connect time, and every other imaginable resource (using locally written software) until the interactive computing experience was surpassingly unpleasant for everyone: students, faculty, and staff alike. Relief was still more than a year away. One of the measures taken to alleviate the load on CU20A was to abolish the free perpetual student user IDs and replace them with class-related IDs that lasted only for the duration of each course. While this ensured that the DEC-20 was used only for "legitimate" purposes, it also made it impossible for students to build up a corpus of tools and information they could use throughout their Columbia experience. A series of discussions took place throughout 1980 exploring different possibilites for providing students with some form of self-service, inexpensive, removeable media. The result was Kermit. Jan 1980: CUCCA announces its intention to connect to ARPANET, V12#1 (but without any firm prospects of doing so, since in those days the only entree was a big Defense Department grant, which we didn't have and didn't want). In the meantime, however, staff (but not end-users) had access through our DECnet link to COLUMBIA-20.ARPA , the Computer Science DEC-20 (July 1983), and prior to that by dialup to the NYU Elf and guest accounts at Rutgers, Harvard, Stanford, CMU and elsewhere. The ARPANET was important, among other reaons, because it was how DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20 software developers could work together (by email) and share code (by FTP), and this was the beginning of the open software movement. It is important to recall that in those days we were paid to develop and share software. Nowadays most open ("free") software is created by unpaid volunteers. Feb 1980: DECnet first operational (between CU20A and the DN200 in Mudd). Feb 1980: The DEC-20 MM (Mail Manager) e-mail program becomes popular (V12#2). This is a good example of software created by professional staff or graduate students at PDP-10 and DEC-20 sites on the ARPANET (Stanford in this case) and freely shared with other sites. Other examples of the era included the ISPELL spelling checker and corrector (also from Stanford), the EMACS text editor from MIT, the SCRIBE text formatting and typesetting system from CMU (which later became commercial) and TeX from Stanford, the Bliss-10 programming language from CMU, the SAIL programming language from Stanford, the PASCAL compiler from Rutgers, the SITGO instructional FORTRAN package from Stevens Institute of Technology, various LISP systems from different places, and KERMIT communications software from Columbia. In fact, each place contributed bits and pieces to most of these packages so most of them were truly cooperative efforts. MM was used almost universally at Columbia for E-mail from 1980 until about 1995, with usage trailing off thereafter as Windows and the Web took over from text-based computer access. When the DEC-20 line was cancelled, we wrote a new MM program in C for Unix which again, in the sharing spirit, was made available on the ARPANET (later Internet) and adopted by many other sites worldwide as they migrated from TOPS-20 to Unix. MM survives even into the 2010s (details). Jun 1980: We were considering joining TELENET and TYMNET (commercial X.3/X.25 based networks) but never did; it was way too expensive [1]. These were strictly terminal-to-host networks, but would have allowed travellers to dial up with a local call from almost anywhere in the USA or Canada, and conceivably could have taken the place of in-house modem pools. Sep 1980: Donald Knuth visits Columbia and gives a series of lectures on T E X, his computer typesetting system. Oct 1980: Second DEC-20 installed, CU20B, for use by funded researchers and staff only; to be paid for out of income, since the budget request for a second instructional DEC-20 had been denied, again, even though the first one was seriously overloaded, and despite vocal support from students and faculty (and us of course). CU20B removed considerable load from CU20A and bought us some time until we finally were able to expand the instructional resources a year later with CU20C. (In fact, for a short period, we were able to put some students on CU20B, in their own "partition", isolated from the paying users.) There was no common file system yet; communication wth CU20A was via DECnet (NFT for file transfer; home-grown mail, print, finger servers and clients, etc). Nov 1980: The IBM 360/91/75 is retired, replaced by two IBM 4331s (PHOTO), CUVMA and CUVMB. These are featureless boxes that are (as you might expect) more compact and cheaper to run than the 360/91 (and lower too, so you can use them as coffee tables), and they had a new operating system, VM/CMS, which allowed Virtual Machines (VM) to run other operating systems on the same machine, thus keeping our old applications afloat. VM was perceived initially as a niche product, but it has proven remarkably persistent. The 360/91 was so big it had to be cut up with chainsaws to get it out of the building. The Gordian knot of cabling under the floor was unceremoniously disposed of with giant cable snippers the size of posthole diggers. The computer chunks were trucked away and thrown into acid baths to extract the gold. Only the 360/91 console was spared. We had it moved to the lobby of Watson Laboratory and arranged to donate it to the now-defunct Computer Museum in Massachusetts, but it took a year and a half for them to pick it up. In the interim, bits and pieces were removed by passersby as souvenirs. (More about this in the June 1982 entry.) 1981-82 ADP takes over the remaining pockets of decentralized administrative computing: the student systems in Philosophy Hall and the financial and payroll systems in Hogan Hall, and to some extent also the Health Sciences campus. Jan 1981: Superbrains arrive. The Intertec "Superbrain" had been chosen as the first microcomputer we would deploy publicly, despite its embarrassing name, because its solid single-piece construction made it virtually user-proof, and it did indeed stand up to years of (ab)use. It ran CP/M 2.2, an 8-bit (64K) operating system. Apr 1981: After a year or two of talking with Howard Eskin and a doctoral student of his (I forget the name) about how to archive DEC-20 data, Bill Catchings and I designed the basic Kermit protocol. The first Kermit protocol transfer took place on April 29th on a loopback connection between two serial ports on CU20B. CLICK HERE for more about the history of Kermit, and HERE to visit the (post-Columbia) Kermit Project website, where THIS PAGE provides an overview. Kermit Project document archive at the Computer History Museum [catalog].

at the [catalog]. Kermit Project Oral History Transcripts at the Computer History Museum HERE and HERE. May 1981: I talk J. Ray Scott of Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, PA, into installing a leased line between Columbia and CMU and joining our two campuses by DECnet (at least that's how I remember it). CU and CMU informally but effectively merge their DEC-20 systems staffs and run common customized applications and subsystems (esp. the GALAXY spooling system, which we modified to allow printer sharing among multiple DEC-20s and spooling to the Xerox 9700). Soon the network, called CCNET, expanded to several other universities, notably Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, which played an important role in the development of Kermit protocol and software until 1987, and produced Kermit programs for DEC's VMS, TOPS-10, and P/OS operating systems. Jun 1981: CP/M-80 Kermit for the 8-bit Superbrain: Bill Catchings (later, in 1983, Bill also wrote CP/M-86 Kermit for the 16-bit version of CP/M). Shortly after this, the Superbrain was deployed in Mudd. It had no applications to speak of besides Kermit, which was used by students to archive their DEC-20 files onto floppy disks (the purpose for which was Kermit developed). Floppy disks (the then-modern 5.25" ones, not the frisbee-sized ones used on other CP/M micros) for the Superbrain were sold in SSIO, $6.00 each (!). Later, but before 16-bit micros like the IBM PC appeared, we set up (in Watson Lab) a "network" of Superbrains sharing a hard disk, with an EMACS-like editor called MINCE and a Scribe-like text formatter called Sribble. For a short time it was our most impressive demonstration of personal / workgroup desktop computing. (MINCE later became Epsilon and was popular for some years on DOS PCs.) 12 Aug 1981: The 16-bit IBM PC was announced; the Columbia Computer Center orders 20 of them on Day One, sight unseen. The IBM logo makes all the difference. About half of them go to high-profile faculty (who immediately want them to be able to communicate with our central IBM and DEC mainframes; hence MS-DOS Kermit). The original PC had a monochrome monitor (color optional), one or two 160K floppy disks, a small amount of memory (anywhere from 16K to 256K), two RS-232 serial interfaces, no hard disk, no networking. It ran at 4.77MHz, had BASIC built into its ROM (which could be used without an OS or disk), and ran DOS 1.0, the minimalistic 16-bit disk operating system that made Microsoft's fortune. Within a short amount of time, it had become the computer that would dominate the rest of the century and beyond, and spread over the campus like wildfire. But it still took some years for the PC to wipe out the VAXes and PDP-11s in the departments. Up through the early 90s there were still dozens of VAX/VMS installations; entire departments and schools (such as Columbia College) ran on them, with VT100 terminals or DEC word processors (PDP-8 based DECmates) on their desktops. The PC has been a mixed blessing. Untold numbers of people-hours have been lost forever to tinkering -- this slot, that bus; expanded memory, enhanced memory, extended memory. . . Blue Screens Of Death, rebooting, reinstalling the operating system, searching for adapters, hunting for drivers, installing OS and driver upgrades, resolving interrupt conflicts, partitioning disks, backing up disks, adding new devices, configuring networks, fighting application and OS bugs, hunting for patches, fighting viruses, and on and on. Previously this kind of thing was done by a small central full-time professional staff but now it is done by everybody, all the time, at incalculable cost to productivity and progress. Plus how many PC users really back up their hard disks? Not many in my experience, and it is not uncommon for important un-backed-up files to be lost in a disk crash or similar disaster, thus negating weeks, months, or years of work. ON THE PLUS SIDE, however, . . . (? ? ?) My personal theory is that IBM never expected the PC to be so successful. It was thrown together in a rush by a small group (not at Watson Laboratory!) from off-the-shelf components in an effort to get a foothold in the fast-growing microcomputer market. This was not IBM's first personal computer. Besides the 1956 Auto-Point Computer ("personal" but by no means desktop), IBM had also tried and failed with the 5100 and the CS-9000 in the 1970s and early 80s, both personal desktop models (we had some 5100s here; the CS-9000 was targeted at chemical engineering applications as I recall, and had a special control panel and interfaces for instruments, but included a 32-bit CPU and modern programming languages like Pascal, and could easily have been the high-end workstation of the early 1980s). According to a reliable source, IBM originally wanted the PC to have a Motorola 68000 CPU (which had a simple, flat 32-bit address space) like the CS-9000, but could not get such a product to market in time, so settled for the Intel 8088, a 16-bit segmented architecture with 8-bit data paths. Worse, it had a primitive 16-line interrupt controller, which severely limited the number of devices that could be on the bus. The rest is history. I believe that if IBM had known that the PC would dominate the next two, three, four, or more decades, it would have invested more time, money, and thought in the original design. (Obviously the situation is better in the 21st Century. Most of the early kinks have been ironed out. PCs are cheap and reliable. Any quirks of the architecture are well-hidden from end users, and USB makes life immeasurably better when devices need to be attached. With Windows the dominant operating system, the main problems now are performance – bloated OS and applications – and security. And stability.) Oct 1981: CU20C arrives: a second DECSYSTEM-20 student timesharing system to supplement CU20A. Still no common file system; each DEC-20 was a relatively separate world, but at least they were connected by DECnet. If you had a student user ID, it was on one or the other, not both. Dec 1981: HP plotter supplies (personal ink cartridges, etc) were a hot topic in the newsletter. The HP pen plotters installed in Mudd (and SSIO?) came in 4- and 8-color models, and there was a wide variety of software for them, including DISSPLA/TEL-A-GRAF on the DEC-20s and SAS/GRAPH and SPSS on the IBM mainframes that could make 3D plots with hidden-line elimination, fancy fonts, etc. They were totally mechanical: pen and ink on paper, and could produce beautiful line drawings. Jan 1982: J. Ray Scott, Director of the Carnegie-Mellon University Computation Center, writes an article in the CUCCA Newsletter (V14#1) describing the CCNET connection between Columbia and CMU, and CMU's facilities (including an ARPANET gateeway and various compilers and applications that had not been licensed at Columbia). In the first example of network-based inter-university resource sharing at Columbia, CU users were invited to apply for user IDs on the CMU systems. Feb 1982: The IBM 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS) was installed (for the 1980 Census) - 102.2 GB. The MSS was gigantic in every sense, covering most of the South wall of the machine room. Essentially it was a big honeycomb, each cell holding a cartridge (PHOTO) that resembles an M-79 rifle grenade (sorry, it does) containing a winding of 2.7-inch-wide magtape with a capacity of 50MB. A mechanical hand comes and extracts the cartridge and carries it to a reader, which removes the shell, and unwinds the tape and copies it to one of four staging disks; then the tape is re-wound, the shell replaced, and the cartridge returned to its cell. All this was transparent to the user; the MSS looked like a 3330 disk drive to user-mode software. The disks acted as a cache, so if your file was already on the disk, the little mechanical man didn't need to go get the cartridge. (Before the MSS, we had an IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, which worked in a similar way, except instead of cartridges, it used flat strips of tape that were much harder for the little men to handle, so the tape strips were easily mangled.) Like the 360/91, there were only a few MSS devices in the world. The MSS cost about a million dollars, but Columbia got its MSS in an IBM grant. In return, Columbia would add support for it to IBM's VM operating system (in particular, it would add windowing and lookahead features to reduce "cylinder faults" and redundant cartridge fetches, and thus speed up sequential access; this was done by Bob Resnikoff of the Computer Center and Ates Dagli of the Center for Social Sciences (CSS)). CSS was responsible for loading the census data (which came on endless reels of 9-track magtape) and for arranging access to it from within Columbia and from outside (V14#16). When the grant expired, Columbia was able to purchase the MSS at a steep discount. Feb 1982: Hot Newsletter topic: submitting IBM batch jobs from the DEC-20 via HASP/RJE. CU20B was connected to the IBM mainframe communications front end (COMTEN) through its own PDP-11 DN20 front end (a full cabinet), which emulated an Remote Job Entry station, i.e. a card reader for sending data to the mainframe in form of card images, and a line printer for receiving data from the mainframe in the form of print jobs, but using DEC-20 disk files instead of cards and paper. The CUCCA systems group developed user-friendly programs for submitting batch jobs to the VM systems from the DEC-20 and retrieving the results. These were later to form the basis of the DEC-20/BITNET mail gateway. Mar 1982: RSTS/E retired; RSTS users migrated to DEC-20s, V14#1. The PDP-11/50 was traded for another badly needed RP06 disk drive for our DEC-20s [1]. The PDP-11 with RSTS/E was our first experiment in campuswide public timesharing and it was an unqualified success. Apr 1982: BITNET announced (Vace, V14#5). This was a network of IBM mainframes based on RSCS (basically, card reader / line printer simulation) protocols, originating with Ira Fuchs at CUNY, formerly of Watson Lab, and rapidly spreading to universities all over the world, lasting through the late 1990s, now remembered mainly for LISTSERV (a distributed automated mailing-list management system). Early members included CUNY, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton, the U of Maine, Penn State, the NJ Educational Network, Boston U, and Cornell University (DIAGRAM). Columbia got the CU prefix (CUVMA, CUVMB), much to the chagrin of Cornell University (CORNELLA, ...) Would this be the first instance of domain name hijacking? :-) (Twenty years later, the Cornell and Columbia teaching hospitals would merge to form New York Presbyterian Hospital; evidently "Cornell" and "Columbia" were omitted from the name so that neither one would have to follow the other.) Apr 1982: IBM Mainframe VM/CMS Kermit (Daphne Tzoar). This passed through a number a hands since the initial release, some of which prefer to remain anonymous, and has been cared for by Dr. John Chandler at the Harvard/Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory since about 1990; John made it portable to the other important IBM mainframe OS's: MVS/TSO, CICS, and MUSIC, and added support for conversion between the many IBM EBCDIC Country Extended Code Pages and ISO standard character sets, allowing cross-platform transfer of text in many languages. May 1982: Support was added to our e-mail client and server software to take advantage of our new CCNET and BITNET connections, and the first inter-campus e-mail began to flow, limited at first to just a handful of universities, but growing rapidly as CCNET and BITNET nodes are added, and gateways from them to ARPANET, CSNET, and other networks. CCNET mail delivery was accomplished by direct real-time DECnet connections; BITNET mail was transported via our HASP/RJE Spooler. Our three DEC-20s used their DECnet connections for mail amongst themselves, as well as with other campus machines and the wider CCNET. CU20A and CU20C and other campus DECnet nodes sent BITNET mail by relaying it over DECnet to CU20B's RJE system. In those days, e-mail addresses had to include a "top-level domain" that indicated the network, e.g. USER@HOST.ARPA , USER@HOST.BITNET , USER@HOST.CCNET , etc. Even trickier was the "source routing" used in Usenet (in those days, a "network" of UNIX machines that dialed each other up with UUCP periodically to exchange files and mail) and some others, and/or to mail to somebody who was on a network that your host wasn't on, through a relay that was on both nets. In such cases you had to know the entire route and the syntax tricks to traverse each branch of it, and often multiple relays. Here are some examples from the 1980s Kermit mailing list archive:

MOON@SCRC@MIT-MC decwrl!rhea!vax4!arson!roberts@SU-Shasta "INFO-KERMIT@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA"@su-shasta info-kermit%columbia-20.arpa.mulga.UUCP@Berkeley decvax!mulga!nemeth.uacomsci@UCB-VAX.ARPA Ken Poulton <kdp%hp-labs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> <info-kermit%columbia-20.arpa%ucl-cs.arpa%ykxa@ucl-cs.arpa> "ETD1::LABOVITZ" <labovitz%etd1.decnet@afwal-aaa.arpa> ames!tis.llnl.gov!lll-tis!lll-crg!lll-winken!uunet!convex!- otto!jimi!unsvax.uucp!bartlett@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU

(9-track magnetic tapes were big in these days, but every kind of computer used a different format: ANSI, DUMPER, BACKUP, MAGSAV, IBM OS SL, tar, cpio, etc, so writing tape import/export/conversion utilities was a regular cottage industry.)

(Around here, large departmental PC labs began to appear, for example in the Business School and in the Learning Center.)

1986-1987 West German hackers use Columbia's Kermit software to break into dozens of US military computers and capture information for the KGB, as described by Cliff Stoll in his 1989 book, The Cuckoo's Egg [46]. At one point, while Cliff watched on a jury-rigged T-connected terminal, the hackers were using Kermit to download a copy of the Telnet source code so they could implant a password logger, upload the result, recompile it, and install it: "Line by line, I watched Kermit shovel the program over to the hacker... But I couldn't just kill Kermit. He'd notice that right away. Now that I was closing in on him, I especially didn't want to tip my hand. I found my key chain and reached over to the wires connected to the hacker's line. Jangling the keys across the connector, I shorted out his circuit for an instant. This added just enough noise to confuse the computer, but not enough to kill the connection... It worked like a charm. I'd jangle my keys, he'd see the noise, and his computer would ask for a replay of the last line..." This slowed the transfer down so much that the hacker eventually lost patience and gave up -- but it didn't stop Kermit! As long as the connection stays up, no matter how awful, Kermit pushes the file through. Cliff also measured the delay between Kermit packet and acknowledgment to estimate the hacker's distance from California (6000 miles, a fairly accurate estimate of the distance to Hannover). 1 Jan 1986: CUCCA and Libraries merge. Information is information, right? (V18#2). CUCCA now reports to the University Librarian, Pat Battin. (In fact, it seems that CUCCA and Libraries merge periodically; in some sense, CUCCA has always reported to the University Librarian; in another sense the real merger came only later, under Elaine Sloan.) The administrative half of CUCCA, ADP (now AIS, Administrative Information Services), is severed and reports to Low Library, and eventually (1991) moves from Watson Lab to Thorndike Hall at Teachers College. Jan 1986: Columbia's first networked PC lab opens in 251 Engineering Terrace, populated with the UNIX (Pro/380), MS-DOS (Rainbow) and VAX workstations from the Hermit grant, plus eight 512K ("fat") Macintoshes and two Mac/XLs, a LaserWriter printing station, an IBM PC, and the original Kermit Superbrain (V18#2). The Pro/380 was a workstation made by DEC with a PDP-11 inside. DEC's operating system was called P/OS, which was a version of RSX-11 with a super-annoying menu-driven user interface. We adapted 2.8BSD UNIX to the machine for use in the lab, so these were the first public Unix workstations deployed at Columbia. Furthermore, unlike the Rainbows, Macs, and the PC (which communicated only through their serial ports with Kermit), they were on Ethernet, and therefore on the Internet. Jan 1986: Kermit Project founded. Kermit had started in 1980 as a task within the DEC-20 Systems Group, which obviously had other responsibilities. By the mid-80s, Kermit had become popular all over the world, and we were receiving hundreds of requests for it every week from sites that were not on the network. Meanwhile, other sites were sending in new Kermit implementations of their own. Fulfilling these requests and maintaining the Kermit software archive (and mailing list, etc) had become a full-time job, so a full-time Kermit group, led by Christine Gianone (formerly the business manager in SSIO), was created to manage and distribute the software and take over the online archive, the mailing lists, tech support, and so on. The programming was still done by members of the Systems group and external volunteers. Software distribution charges were instituted to cover costs. The old raised-floor machine room in the back of the 7th floor of Watson Lab (added in 1959 for the IBM 1620) became the Kermit room, containing the Kermit Project computers and media production equipment. May 1986: The height of CCNET, which now includes Columbia, CMU, CWRU, NYU, Stevens, Vassar, and Oberlin (V18#5). An October 1986 listing shows about 200 "nodes" on the network with DEC operating systems including TOPS-10, TOPS-20, VMS, Ultrix, RSX-11/M, and P/OS. Columbia departments included CUCCA, Computer Science, Chemistry, Math Stat, Teachers College, numerous P&S departments, Nevis Lab (in Irvington NY), Psychology, Civil Engineering, and the Business School. Other universities (mainly in Ohio) would join later, but in a few more years the Internet would make CCNET obsolete. May 1986: First public description of Columbia's Ethernet backbone network, and enunciation of policy for departmental connections to it (V18#5), which was accomplished by us writing a letter for the Provost to sign. Jul 1986: First issue of Kermit News . 16 Jul 1986: Columbia University as a whole (as opposed to only the Computer Science Department) receives approval from the Defense Projects Research Agency to join the ARPANET (which would soon become the Internet) [SEE LETTER]. Aug 1986: Mathematics joins Ethernet backbone. 1986: (month?) Richard Sacks takes over as acting CUCCA Director. (Howard leaves somewhere in here...) Sep 1986: The Scholarly Information Center (SIC) is proclaimed by Pat Battin, University Librarian. Sep 1986: More about the campus backbone: "A bright yellow half-inch coaxial cable runs through the steam tunnels up and across the west and north edges of the Morningside campus. This cable is the campus Ethernet backbone, a large part of which was installed as part of an external research grant from Digital Equipment Corporation [the Hermit Project]." (Alan Crosswell, Networks at Columbia , SIC Journal V1#1, Sep 1986). The backbone ran from Watson Lab to Mathematics to Chemistry to the Computer Center to Computer Science to Mudd (DIAGRAM). At the time coax-based IBM PCNET and Token Ring PC networks were commonplace networking methods for PCs. Oct 1986: Kermit, A File Transfer Protocol (Frank) published by Digital Press, with a Foreword by Donald Knuth. It remained in print for 14 years. Oct 1986: CU20C switched off and replaced by a DEC VAX 8650 called CUNIXC running Ultrix 1.1, DEC's brand of UNIX, a 4.2BSD derivative. A pilot project assigned some CS courses to CUNIXC in Fall 1986. This was our first step in phasing out the DEC-20s after the line was discontinued by DEC in 1983. This stung so severely that we would never run a proprietary operating system again (except on the IBM mainframes, of course). The attraction of UNIX was that it was available -- with relatively minor variations -- on all kinds of computers, great and small. The 8650 was approximately equal to the DEC-20 in size, weight, and cost; it was chosen because we could recycle many of the DEC-20 peripherals, and because (unlike other UNIXes) it supported DECnet, which we still used for departmental connections. Lots more HERE about the conversion from TOPS-20 to Unix.

(About UNIX... There is much that appeals about UNIX. Its well-known original attributes (simplicity, terseness, consistent building-block tools) were spelled out in the seminal BSTJ issue [15]. In addition, it is platform independent, so sites like ours are not tied to a particular vendor. Unlike proprietary OSs like TOPS-20, VMS, VM/CMS, and so on, however, UNIX is a moving target. Ever since control of UNIX left Bell Labs, every implementation (Ultrix, OSF/1, AIX, HP-UX, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, Linux, FreeBSD, etc etc) is different in sometimes subtle but always aggravating ways, and (with a few notable exceptions such as OpenBSD) every new release of every varation tends to break existing applications (whereas programs written for TOPS-20, VMS, MVS/TSO, or VM/CMS decades ago still work, without even recompiling). Any program more complicated than "hello world" is rarely portable from one UNIX to another without some "porting" work at the source-code level. To compound matters, documentation is increasingly scant. In the 1970s and 80s, every operating system (even UNIX) came with a "wall" of printed manuals that documented everything in excruciating detail. But now documentation is considered a waste of time and effort, since everything will change anyway. In modern UNIX, the only reliable documentation is the source code, and even that decays over time.)

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Jan 1990: Using MS-DOS Kermit (Christine) published by Digital Press, with a jacket blurb by Cliff Stoll (Yow!), author of The Cuckoo's Egg [46]. A second edition was published in 1992. German and French translations were also published, as was another book about MS-DOS Kermit in Japanese (see the Kermit Bibliography). May 1990: Vace Kundakci takes over as Director, renames CUCCA to AcIS (Academic Information Systems), as distinct from AIS (Administrative Information Services, formerly ADP). Mid-1990: Alan Crosswell becomes Systems Manager, responsible for all central academic computing systems (IBM and other), a post last held by Howard Eskin and vacated 5 years before. By this time the only central computers that matter are Unix-based (DEC, then Encore, then Sun, plus workstations from Sun, NeXT, and HP) — the academic IBM mainframe is used mainly by the Libraries and a handful of external paying users.

(Somewhere around here CCNET was disbanded because of the Internet.)

Jan 1991: The Senior Vice President of Columbia is bitten by the outsourcing bug and brings in a consulting firm, American Management Systems Inc (AMS), to take over and "clean out" administrative computing (AIS). Seventeen people are fired. Although a couple of service improvements resulted (mainly a new Student Information System, SIS), many millions of dollars were wasted on "cutting edge" projects that never panned out and a number of talented people were lost. Eventually AMS left the scene and equilibrium was restored. 1991: We buy a truckload of NeXT UNIX (NeXTSTEP) workstations for both staff and labs (photo); a major commitment, and (I believe) an attempt to stem the tide of PCs and Macs, which were intrinsically unsafe and labor intensive for their users and owners (the PCs more so than Macs, which have always had a great deal of support from a large contingent of the technical staff) and for AcIS staff in its role of support-giver. The NeXTs were configured and managed centrally; user logins were via network to the central University database; user directories were on centrally located, managed, and backed up NFS-mounted disks. But before long NeXT was out of business. 1991: There is much expansion, renovation, and upgrading of public computer labs during 1991 (and ever since). The academic and administrative IBM mainframes (4381, 3090, and 3083) are all replaced by a single IBM ES/9121, which is partitioned into separate academic and administrative virtual machines (a feature of IBM's VM operating system). Jan 1991: Three Sun-4/280s (full-sized cabinets) are installed in the machine room as CUNIXA, CUNIXB, and CUNIXD running SunOS 4.1. These (and the Encore) were soon replaced by Sun pizza-box sized servers, and SunOS was replaced by Solaris. Where central computers once weighed tons, cost millions, filled acres of floor space, required massive cooling and exotic forms of power, now they're dirt-cheap commodity items running at unheard-of speeds with seemingly limitless amounts of memory and storage, that can be carried under your arm and plugged into an ordinary wall socket at ambient room temperature. Of course, today's applications and data saturate this vast capacity just as effectively as yesterday's simpler applications overwhelmed the resources available then, and so it shall always be. Mar-Oct 1991: Kermit protocol for conversion of Japanese text among diverse encodings, and for efficient transfer of predominantly 8-bit text encodings over 7-bit transports.

(Around here, disk service begins to shift from locally attached disks to RAID file servers, and the backup system changes from the traditional manual 9-track tape operation to automated network backups to a DAT-drive "juke box". All the software was locally written and included all the academic servers, Sun as well as the IBM mainframe. Later a commercial backup system, Veritas, took the place of the original homegrown one. Capacity as of Jan 2001: 400 x 40GB tapes = 16000GB (16TB) to cover 1.7TB usable space on the academic file servers.)

Jan 1992: Conversion of Morningside campus backbone from Ethernet coax to optical fiber begins; cutover in Spring 1992. Apr 1992: AIS moves out of Watson Lab to new quarters in Thorndike Hall at Teachers College (MAP) and in the Computer Center Building [20]. Floors 1 through 5 of Watson Lab were left vacant for a period, and then, even though the AcIS space on floors 6-9 was (and remains) severely and increasingly overcrowded, the lower five floors — with their rich history and key role in science and computing — were converted to art studios. Nov 1992: Using C-Kermit (Frank and Christine) published by Digital Press, concurrent with the release of version 5 of C-Kermit. A second edition would follow in 1997, as well as a German translation. 1992-1993: Columbia's Kermit software handles the communications in the British relief mission to Bosnia. 1993: The era of the search engine begins. First there was Archie, then Hypertelnet, then Gopher, then the Web. In 1993, ColumbiaNet is hot, a million accesses per year (a figure soon to be dwarfed by the Web, see Web statistics table). ColumbiaNet is a text-based menu-driven service (remember text?). Here's the main menu, preserved for posterity:

Main Menu: 1: Directory Information (WWW) 2: AcIS--Academic Computing (WWW) 3: CLIO Plus--Library Catalogs, Indexes, Encyclopedia 4: Calendar, Events, & Schedules 5: Classes, Finals, Grades, Holds, Bulletins 6: Student Activities & Services 7: Faculty & Research 8: Job Opportunities 9: Connections to Computers & the Internet 10: University Administrative Services 11: Handbooks, Reports 12: Organization & Governance; The Record 13: Misc Info--News, Weather, Quotations, Books 14: Community Interest 15: ColumbiaNet News: New News: AP, Reuters Available _________________________________________________________ Select 1-17 or S=scan-all-menus Q=quit 90% seen N=next-page B=bottom H=help I=info



[ Introduction ] [ Timeline ] [ Epilog ] [ Tables ] [ Acronyms ] [ Glossary ] [ Sources ] [ Links ] [ SEARCH ] [ FAQ ]

Epilog

The first paragraph below was written a long time ago and doesn't really apply more. In the new century, computing resources are mainly private and the University happily supplies the mostly invisible infrastructure. There are no more budget battles as in the 1970s and 80s, nowadays nobody questions the importance of universal high-speed network availability and when the network needs expanding or upgrading, it happens without a struggle. Furthermore support staff is at an all-time high, by far, as is office space. But then, so is tuition, yet students get a lot less bang for the buck in terms of employment prospects after graduation, not to mention many of them being saddled with enormous debt. Sometimes I wonder if students 100 or 250 years ago didn't get a better education with just lectures, blackboards, and books.

A theme that runs throughout this story is the neverending tug-of-war between supply and demand. Computers were extremely expensive in the early days, and space has always been the most valuable resource at Columbia's confined urban campus. The first computers were obtained largely through grants for specific research projects, but soon other uses were found for them and the University became increasingly dependent on them. After the grants expired the computers had to be continuously maintained, upgraded, and replaced. The eternal questions have been: How to pay? What to sacrifice? Where to put the equipment? How to get the space? How to recoup the expense? How to increase access? How to allocate limited computing resources? How to expand resources that are swamped by increasing demand? Who subidizes and who is subsidized?

It's interesting to ponder the transformation of Columbia from a quill-pen operation in the 1700s to the "wired" (and, increasingly, wireless) one it is today. Computers, obtained originally for scientific work that could not be done any other way, were also turned to administrative tasks such as registration, student records, payroll, and so on. What was the cost in money, space, and personnel before and after? And then later when centralized computing (based on a single multimillion dollar computer system) became fully distributed, with a PC on every desk, how did that change the overall expenditures, consumption of space and electrical power, personnel rosters, and the productivity of each person? Any clear answer would take a great deal more research than was done here, but the following table is suggestive:

1925 2010 Increase Students 24188 27606 14% Officers of Instruction 1771 3630 205% Officers of Administration 92 5813 6218% Full-Time Support Staff 1198 3402 184% Tuition (dollars per point) 8 1372 17150% Sources: The 1925 figures come from Columbia's 1924-25 Catalog [5] and from the 1924-25 Annual Report [35]; the student count does not include another 12,916 summer session students; the officers of administration include 38 who are also on the faculty. The 2010 figures come from the Columbia University Statistical Abstract of the Office of Planning and Institutional Research (on the Web). The growth in faculty is accounted for almost entirely by the Health Sciences campus, which did not exist in 1925.

Although the role of computing in staff and tuition increases is far from clear, it is evident that Columbia University was able to offer a first-class education to about 20,000 students annually with a lot less overhead and at far less expense without computers than with them, even accounting for inflation (which averaged 3.1% per year from 1925 to 2000 or 987% over the period; thus if tuition had merely kept pace with inflation, it would have risen only to $79 per point rather than $834 in 2000). Of course, one can't necessarily blame computers alone for a topheavy bureaucracy -- since the 1950s, huge amounts of additional work in the form of reports (compliance, demographic, financial, etc) mandated by government, suppliers, and contractors at every level. Anyway, as any student who registered in the old days (filling in countless forms by hand with the same information and standing in about 50 lines to turn in each form) can tell you, some of the new systems are an improvement. Columbia is also a far bigger employer than it was in 1925 and it's a good thing that more people have work, even if it's pointless. Or if you take a closer look, maybe it's not such a good thing.

When the Computer Center opened in 1963, there was one big computer for everybody to use, cared for by a small professional staff, initially just 15 people. Today, the combined full-time staff of AcIS and AIS (now CUIT) numbers well into the hundreds, and this doesn't count an unknown number of full and part-time computer people in the administrative and academic departments, nor junior faculty and graduate students shanghaied into system-administration roles, nor the fact that almost everybody at the University devotes copious time to "managing" and fighting with their own desktop computers into the bargain, not to mention dealing (or worse: not) with the constant onslaught of viruses, worms, and hacks from all corners of the world. One is tempted to wonder in exactly what way computers are labor-saving devices :-)

But love 'em or hate 'em, computers and networks are with us to stay. They first came to Columbia for scientific and statistical work; now they are used mainly for social and entertainment purposes, plus taking notes in class, preparation of papers, a certain amount of course work, and for carrying on the business of the University, including a great deal of public relations. All students and faculty are presumed to have computer, network, and Web access; it is required in many courses and for numerous tasks such as looking up class schedules, room assignments, and grades, and since Fall 2001, also for registration.

The benefits of the Web are well known but its dangers little discussed, at least not beyond the well-known safety hazards (credit-card theft, pedophiles, viruses) and annoyances (bugs and new features requiring constant software upgrades). Let's look at some of the more fundamental pitfalls that tend to be ignored as we rush to replace all that is old by what is new:

For good or ill, the Web has largely replaced the Library for undergraduate research. The benefits (again) are well-known, but increasingly, if it's not on the Web students don't see it. Furthermore, it's often difficult to assess the information one finds on the Web. Published books and journal articles, at least, have some measure of quality control and some form of audit trail (you can check the primary sources yourself). At the very least, they are substantial and immutable objects that can be referenced -- when you look at a book or article that I have referenced, you see the same one I saw. Web pages are ephemeral, likely to move, change, or disappear at any moment, and in any case rarely have the authority of a refereed, printed publication.

Since I wrote the previous item, the Web itself has been largely supplanted by Google and Wikipedia for research. Wikipedia is handy, to be sure, but how do you verify the accuracy of anything in it? Google, on the other hand, is a massive corporation whose only goal is making more and more money, and as part of achieving that goal, it controls the content we see. Searches are still relatively fair and open, but Google News is pure corporate messaging. Nevertheless, Google can throw a switch at any moment to hide entire bodies of knowledge or opinion it deems prejudicial to its corporate health.

In a new application of Gresham's Law, the Web tends to drive out reliable and detailed information, replacing it with unreliable and sketchy "sound bites". Libraries full of books and journals are increasingly viewed as "legacy" "brick and mortar" operations that can no longer justify their existence in the age of electronic information. But those same libraries contain all that is known of history, culture, and science. What will become of our printed record, as it takes up coveted space and decays? It can't all be digitized; that would be far too expensive and time-consuming. Therefore much -- probably most -- of it will be lost to posterity. And then whatever portion was digitized before the paper was discarded or crumbled will itself be subject to successive rounds of winnowing as the digital media, encoding, and formats become obsolete and require "upgrading".