UMass Dartmouth Office of Computing and Information Technology Services (CITS) publications

March 13, 1968 the university installed its first computer mainframe, an IBM 360/30. The SMTI Computation Center announced the availbility of the IBM 360/30 to process jobs in March of 1968. In order to use the computer, one had to become a registered user and learn DOS. There were no programmers on the staff at that time. In 1969, a student employee, David Simpkin, wrote a program to aid processing grades for large classes. In 1978 (?) Academic Computing Services added a DECSystem-20, which operated on the BASIC programming language. The department was divided into its 2 functions - Academic Computing Service and Central Comuting Servive and was located on the third floor of the Library. In 1975 the center had 7 punch card machines, 8 APL terminals and batch processing input/output. In other areas of the camus, there er 2 punch card mancine in t he GTextile Building anf 2 in the Group 2, CE Computation room. In 1985, President John Brazil appointed the Compluter Planning Group to develop a comprehensive five-year plan for all computing functions at SMTU. According to "A Plan for Computing at SMU, 1987-1992," the model was no longer a single mainframe, but multiple machines (DEC20, VAX, Prime, Apollo, and at least 5 kinds of micro-computers), and while use increased annually, staffing levels did not. The Academic Computing Services offered Social Science Statistical programs for use on the DEC 20. In September of 1978 the DEC system was upgraded with an additonal 256 K of storage.By 1986 the SMU comuputer center supported 2 mainframes. the Decsystem 2060 was available for academic and administrative purposes. The VAX 11/780 provided support for instructional computing. Personal computers (IBM PCs and Apple Macs)were located in 3 microclusters and were connected to the mainframes via a Metapath network. During the summer of 1986 Computing center was divided into 2 sservices - Centeral Comouting Service and Academic Comuting Service.Starting in 1988 the Campus Shop began selling microcomputers. Dial-In modems set up in 1988. 1980s began buying software for campus users. By Fall of 1988 ACS supported 20 software packages in 5 categories.(word rcessing, spreadsheets, programming, statistics, and database management). Data communication Advisory group formed in 1988 toadvise on network planing and implementation issues. By the spring of 1989, in preparation for the budget year 1991, all state colleges and universities required to submit a Computing and Communications PMaster plan based upon the Campus Strategic plan being submitted to Board of Regents in 1988. SMU joined BITNET, a WAN (wide area network)in 1988.Existing campus networks (LANS) in 1988 were Metapath and Ethernet. Barbara Horgan hired as Director of Central Comoputing.