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"You guys ought to do some time-sharing."
That's exactly how he said it, recalls retired mathematics professor Thomas
Kurtz of his 1961 conversation with John McCarthy, the man who five years prior
had coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" while he was teaching
math at Dartmouth. Now at MIT, McCarthy had led a team in programming a Digital
Equipment Corporation PDP-1 computer to simultaneously process the tasks of
more than one user, a then-revolutionary idea. Unable to get MIT's full backing
for the "time-shared computing" concept, he tossed out the idea to
his former Dartmouth colleagues Kurtz and John Kemeny. "We accepted the
idea full bore," says Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC computer language
with Kemeny, and the first director of Dartmouth's Kiewit Computation
Center.
Three years later (in February), Kemeny and Kurtz, armed with a half-million
dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, installed a GE computer in
the basement of College Hall, a space taken over from the College photographer.
Assisted by a team of student programmers led by John McGeachie '65 and Mike
Busch '66 (who "swarmed over the new hardware," according to Kurtz),
they set out to teach the machine to run the newly written BASIC language in a
time-sharing environment.
 "In only two-and-a-half months," says Kurtz,
"the 'kids' got the time-sharing system to service two teletypes and run a
simple BASIC program. The official legend is that this all took place at 4:00
a.m. on May 1, 1964. Mean time to failure was about five minutes. However, by
the middle of June, the system was 'reliably' servicing 11 teletypes well
enough to allow Kemeny to introduce the new 'baby' to the faculty. And by fall,
there were 20 terminals."
By fall 1968, the Kiewit Computation Center had been built with a $650,000
gift from Peter Kiewit '22 and his wife, Evelyn. The 100 simultaneous users of
its GE-635 running the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) included not only
Dartmouth users, who reserved time in advance and signed in to use the
terminals in half-hour increments (taking their output with them in rolled-up
sheets of yellow teletype paper), but students at seven New England secondary
schools: Philips Exeter, St. Paul's, Mount Hermon, Vermont Academy, Philips
Andover, Hanover High, and Mascoma Valley Regional. It was an initiative that
eventually would spread to 30 colleges and 20 schools in New England, 12
colleges in Canada, and scores of educational and research organizations
throughout North America. Kemeny's three-part vision — user-friendly
campus-wide computing, access without charge for faculty and students, and
encouragement of computer-aided instruction across the entire curriculum — was
already in place. The "Kemeny legacy" was born.
General Electric, seeing the potential for a more commercial legacy of its
own, renamed DTSS the "GE Mark I" and started offering it to the rest
of the world. For Dartmouth and General Electric, it was a technological
high-water mark, albeit a short-lived one. Individual users sharing time on
large computers would eventually be replaced by small computers sharing time on
large networks.
But if DTSS was Dartmouth's technological peak, it was far from an
innovative one. "Dartmouth isn't a technological innovator," says
Kurtz today, looking back across his 44 years of involvement; "it's a
usage innovator."
And the consensus of the College's next usage innovation happened at
precisely the time everyone either shrinking from, or hurrying toward the
future, had been waiting for: 1984. In one of the most memorable commercials
ever aired on television, Apple threw its hammer into the Big Brother face of
the IBM personal computer. Dartmouth joined the revolution. The trustees
approved the inclusion of the cost of an Apple Macintosh in the basic fee
structure of the College, thus allowing financial aid to pay for it. Between
April and November, the entire campus was wired with 2,600 connections, a
"port for every pillow," as the saying goes. By the end of the year,
there was an online Dartmouth Mail Directory to send electronic mail to anyone
on campus, and a little more than half the card catalog of the library system
was searchable over the network by entering c lib into any
DTSS network terminal, on or off campus. It would take another year and a half
to develop, but work was already underway for DarTerminal, a file
transfer program to integrate all those user-friendly Macintoshes into the same
system. Dartmouth was by acclaim the most wired, most plugged-in, most
computer-saturated liberal arts institution on the planet, and it seemed to
have happened overnight.
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