Are you reading this in a printed newspaper? If so, chances are it’s one of the few analog texts with which you’ll interact today, thanks in part to Vassar’s computing network and the Computing and Information Services (CIS) Department.
Most of these services are so ubiquitous that we only notice them when they aren’t working. Such was the case last week, when a campus-wide AskBanner outage prevented students from accessing their schedules, transcripts and other information. The current generation of Vassar students may have a hard time remembering life without the Internet, but the network we use and abuse at Vassar has been in development for over 50 years.
The College has a long history of computing, thanks largely to Vassar professor Winifred “Tim” Asprey ‘38. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Asprey worked to incorporate computing into Vassar’s math curriculum, frequently inviting IBM employees to lecture on campus. In 1967, Vassar was the second college in the United States to buy an IBM computer.
As the College acquired more hardware, the Old Laundry Building was converted into a computer center, with classes taught on the upper levels and the Academic Computing Center in the basement.
By the early ’80s Vassar students could pre-register for courses via computer, but the process was still quite unlike what today’s Vassar students do. Students were assigned computer-generated draw numbers, but they still had to go to Kenyon Gym to pick up punch cards for the classes they wanted, and then bring the cards to the Registrar’s Office to be processed.
In the 1990s, the College began working on digitizing its record databases. “It was the first time we actually tried to put up [database] components that would talk to each other,” said Dean Emeritus of the College Colton Johnson. “That was a difficult process because all the different departments [in the College] had been keeping records in their own particular way.” April 1991 was the first time Vassar students were able to pre-register online for courses, and in September 1992 Vassar announced plans to construct the Computer Center next to the Old Laundry Building.
This was the time, Johnson observed, that the divide between Vassar’s ex-IBM employees and its computer laypeople was shrinking. “People began to talk the same way [about computing] … it became something that we all shared, and therefore we shared an interest in integrating it with campus,” said Johnson.
But this generation’s comfort and confidence in computers was still a few years off. In December 1999 Vassar was so worried about Y2K bugs that students were not allowed to remain on campus for the Winter Break. The Documentary Chronicle of Vassar College quotes contemporary CIS director Diane Balestri saying, “The range of possibilities [is from] essentially nothing to catastrophic … We have to decide if we should have a New Year’s party on campus or close everything down and have a SWAT team investigate.”
Now, the Computer Science Department is still in the Old Laundry Building, and the Computer Center houses Vassar’s servers and acts as the hubcap for fiber-optic cabling as well as the offices of the CIS staff. Over 150 servers run day and night in the Center and in a warehouse behind Buildings and Grounds.
Another one of the CIS Department’s jobs is to defend the College from viruses, hackers and denial of service attacks. Very few of these attacks are malicious or intentional, however. Vice President for CIS Bret Ingerman explained, “A lot of times [the hackers] aren’t aiming for Vassar, they’re just looking and hitting places…[but] our network is as secure as we can make it and blissfully we have very few outages.”
Vassar’s CIS has developed along with the technological advancements and culture shifts brought by computers.
Source:http://www.miscellanynews.com/2.1578/cis-services-keep-vc-connected-1.2690049#.TyIpZ8WyaoY
