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But swift as the adoption of the Macintosh was, it was
still slow by some others' reckoning. The PC had been available since the
hobby-kit Altair 8800 began shipping in 1975, complete with a variant of
Dartmouth's own BASIC as its native programming language. That language wasn't
Dartmouth's, though. It wasn't anybodys. Kemeny and Kurtz, believing fervently
in making every aspect of computing open and free to every user, had released
it into the public domain, a fact not missed by the writers of the Altair
variant: Paul Alien and Bill Gates. Within the year, Gates dropped out of
Harvard, joined Alien in forming Microsoft, and rewrote a copyrightable version
of BASIC and began licensing it. By 1977, it was everywhere: in Apples, Radio
Shack Tandys, Commodores, and IBM PCs. Everywhere but Dartmouth, that is. By
then, computing at Dartmouth had moved on.
 "When the Apple IIs and IBM PCs came out, we looked at
them as retrograde technology," says Kurtz. "Dartmouth students
already had full terminal access to mainframe computers using higher-order
languages with virtually unlimited capacity, day or night and without charge. I
remember picking up my first Apple II — I think it was 1983 — and the BASIC it
was running took me back 20 years."
But the Macintosh was different. Not only was its icon-based interface
vastly easier to use, with its 32-bit processor and built-in AppleTalk
networking, it was the first PC that had the power to be hooked into the
Dartmouth network. Adoption by students and faculty with the notable exception
of Tuck School, which had ordered 50 IBM PCs the year before, was immediate and
universal.
Levine, now the chief information officer, arrived with the Macintosh in
1984. As he tells it: "That Mac was a 128K, crash-all-the-time,
two-application masterpiece. Coming from Indiana, I was 'Mr. DOS.' I clucked
and snickered at the Mac. But then I saw how quickly it won people over. And it
didn't win over just DOS users; much more important, it won over people who had
wanted nothing at all to do with computers." Levine became director of
computing in 1991, at the height of the Macintosh monoculture. "Through
about 1994," he says, "Dartmouth was essentially all Mac, and
arrogant about it."
What broke the marriage? Like all divorces, the answer depends on whom you
ask. But without doubt, the two main outside factors were the growth of the
Internet and the market domination of the Windows operating system Dartmouth
was slow to react to the former, reluctant to accept the latter. By the
mid-1990s, however, it had no choice.
"If we weren't as quick with a Web presence as some others," says
William "Punch" Taylor, director of Technical Services for Computing
Services, "it was because we were very enamored of the platform-specific
client software we had written ourselves. Our Macs were seamlessly running
everything from DTSS emulation to BlitzMail on our own network. So
when we first looked at those early Web browsers, it was partly ego and partly
'why switch to an inferior platform?' that caused us to hold back."
The same attitude — if it's not as good, why go there? — was even more
firmly entrenched in the Macintosh monoculture, and with good reason. For 10
years, there had not been a person, faculty, staff member, or undergraduate on
campus who wasn't doing everything on a Macintosh. The problem, of course, was
that most of the rest of the world was doing it on something else, 90 percent
of them on Microsoft Windows. A great university sends its graduates out into
the world with a full box of tools, not a narrow set of prejudices. The
Macintosh monoculture had to go, even if it went kicking. In the fall of 1998,
80 percent of incoming students still chose the Macintosh. By fall of 2002, 80
percent chose Dells, a ratio that has held steady since. And in January
2002, Provost Barry Scherr and Treasurer Win Johnson '67 decreed a three-year
Macintosh-to-Windows migration for all administrative computing at Dartmouth.
The king was dead.
Change was, and remains, inevitable. Dominance in computing is subject to
overthrow everywhere, almost by definition, and even more so at a place such as
Dartmouth. For all its long and rich history of computer innovation, the
positive effects have largely fallen outside the College. Gates took BASIC and
started Microsoft with it. Apple Computer reinvented itself with the Macintosh,
aided in no small way by Dartmouth's nationally trumpeted early adoption of the
machine. Today, Cisco's wireless networking business may be about to enjoy the
rewards of the same stamp of approval. There is, of course, nothing wrong with
this new knowledge, and academic certification are what a great educational
institution is supposed to provide to the world around it, free of charge.
Kemeny knew that. But he also knew that while those companies fattened their
bottom lines, the College's store of intellectual capital would grow even
more.
Ed Gray learned BASIC at Tuck School, where he graduated in 1972, and
has been accessing Dartmouth computers, in one way or another, ever since. He
lives in Lyme, New Hampshire.
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