Becoming a decentralized center

In 1984, Old Dominion University had only limited computer resources to offer the academic community. In the central facility we had a Decsystem-10 mainframe and a lab of twenty ASCII terminals. There was an additional lab of fifteen ASCII terminals in the building next door. This building also housed a lab of twenty CP/M based SuperBrain micros with only two printers (which were down as much as not). There was no remote printing for the terminal lab. And the only software in the micro lab was Basic. Equipment was so limited that students were issued tickets good for two hours of lab usage per week. And these tickets were given only to students in the beginning MIS and CS classes.The dawn of ODU's new computing era began in August of 1984 with the conversion of all DEC-10 programs to IBM. We had just installed an IBM 4381. In order to be operational for Fall Semester, conversion was completed in just three weeks. Most users were given accounts on the MUSIC operating system, and CMS was used for limited batch access only. We then spent a year struggling with new documentation and overcoming faculty and staff resistance to the new, less user-friendly operating systems. A previous administration preferred for individual departments to operate their own computer labs. So, a grant of microcomputers from Texas Instruments was divided among the Colleges of Business, Arts and Letters, and Engineering, and each had set up a lab for the exclusive use of their own students.In 1986 a position of Associate Vice President for Computing Services was created. David Harnage was selected to fill that position. His goal was to make Computer Services the center of computing on campus: not the central location of hardware resources, but the central repository of computer knowledge, training, and documentation. His goal for academic computing was twofold: To place a public-access lab in every College — i.e. every major academic building on campus;To open up as many College-owned facilities as possible to the public by consolidating management under the central facility — central management of decentralized resources.Goal #1 turned out to be unworkable for a couple of reasons. Space is at a premium on our campus. Construction has begun which will relieve some of the congestion, but departments were hard pressed to give up classroom space for the creation of computer labs. Even though they wanted the labs, there just was no space available in some cases. In other cases, where we did place labs in major academic buildings which are not in the central area of campus, students showed great reluctance to use those labs. During congested times in the centrally-located facilities, student staff would announce that plenty of seats were available in other labs. Students responded that they preferred to stay and wait in line rather than go to the more remote sites and be guaranteed a machine to use.Goal #2 has succeeded for the “open” or non-teaching labs. All three Colleges who had departmentally-owned TI labs eventually took us up on the offer to take over the headaches of operating their labs. The one stipulation we imposed was that if we managed a lab, it would be open to all students, regardless of discipline. For these labs, we set about immediately to replace the TI equipment with IBM-compatibles (state procurement procedures (bids) prohibit vendor-specific purchases), to upgrade and expand the software offerings, and to identify, hire, and train competent student consultants.