Many of the services, as well as the staff, were confined by a text-oriented timesharing or transaction processing system. Staff and faculty struggled with equipment that was cranky, clunky and limiting. The technological infrastructure was a barrier to efficient and effective work, not to mention imaginative efforts. Additional funding, of course, was needed. But funding for equipment alone would not be sufficient.
Great things evolve from a solid base, and the base at the time was shaky at best.
We needed a dependable infrastructure, commonality of core abilities and applications, and a whole new approach. Our goal was to establish an environment in which technology was no longer a barrier to work and imagination. Our beginnings with hardware were modest. At the same time we acquired new 66-MHz 486s for the dozen faculty who weren't yet on Windows. In early 1998 we will deploy another batch of even faster Pentium II machines internally and in summer the majority of the public access points will be replaced with then current technology.