Wayne Danielson

Scholia talk

Dec. 21, 1993

Academic Computing at UT-Austin


Thank you for this invitation to speak to you tonight about academic computing at UT Austin.  As I look around the room, I can see any number of people who could do this job better than I.  Perhaps they will help out by asking some questions afterward or making some comments of their own.  I invite them -- and all of you -- to do just that.

My talk will be brief -- for two reasons.  The first is the magical number seven.  George Miller, the famous psycholinguist, wrote an article about the number seven some years back.  It was entitled, “The Magical Number Seven -- Plus or Minus Two,” and it had to do with the fact that as information processors, seven is about what human beings can do.  They can handle seven bytes of new information, plus or minus two.  That’s why, for example, we have  7-digit telephone numbers.  That’s about all the average person can look up in the telephone book and remember long enough to dial the number.  And that’s why our Social Security number is the length that it is -- that’s about all the bytes a person can carry around in his head and produce at will.  My grandchildren just went from seven to nine this year -- and I find that I have a hard time producing all nine names on command.  I suppose you might say I’ve just about reached my grandfatherly information processing limit.

At any rate that’s one reason for my providing tonight a short list of my seven most important perceptions about academic computing at UT Austin.  I really can’t handle many more ideas than that, and besides, I have a Christmas shopping list awaiting me that has at least that many items on it, and I am sure that you do, too.

My second reason for giving a short talk comes from my teacher Wilbur Schramm at Stanford University.  He was a great believer in numbered lists.  His articles and books were full of numbered lists.   It’s as if he anticipated the exams professors would write -- “List Schramm’s four conclusions about the future of mass communication,” or “Comment on Schramm’s five suggestions for improving questions used in public opinion research.”  When I worked for him as a graduate assistant, he always gave me numbered lists of things to do.  And a few years ago, when he died, I imagined receiving a list from him that read:

“1. Attend funeral Thursday.

“2. Your chapter is overdue at the publisher’s.  Please mail it by Friday afternoon.

“3. I’ve gone on to explore the universe.  Please meet me in Orion for Christmas in 2050.”

So, for the relative brevity of this talk, you can thank George Miller and Wilbur Schramm.

On to the list:


1. An increasing fraction of UT’s budget goes for academic computing.


That’s obvious, I suppose.  But it’s important because the number is large and is getting larger.  A recent estimate put the annual expenditure for academic computing at $20 million.  That doesn’t include business side computing at UT -- the registrar’s office, the libraries, payrol l and purchasing and accounting.  The increase has to come from somewhere, and  when budgets are steady or decreasing or eroded by inflation the money must come  from reducing or changing other services.  This meanshiring fewer staff members or faculty.  It  means changing methods of instruction.  It means  replacing traditional forms of equipment.  The simple fact is that the increasing fraction of expenditures being made for academic computing exerts a subtle -- and sometimes not so subtle -- force for change across the campus.


2. All areas of the campus  increasingly participate in academic computing.


Twenty years ago academic computing at UT was mainly the domain of engineers and chemists and astronomers and physicists and computer scientists.

The notion that historians or linguists or sociologists might  be interested in computing was regarded as bizarre or strange.  An article that I wrote about producing individualized issues of newspapers was published in the Journal of the ACM under a heading that read “Unsual Applications.”  All that has changed as computing as moved from being primarily a research tool, to being an instructional tool, and nowadays to being an integral part of all scholarly productivity including library work, the gathering and evaluation of data, the writing of papers and even publishing findings.  The UT press will soonproduce its first book on a disk -- Tim Rowe’s work on dinosaurs.  Although the heaviest users of computation continue to be in engineering and the natural sciences,  others in business, architecture, fine arts, nursing, library and information sciences now are major participants.  Applications in the Liberal Arts have been especially imaginative and productive -- the English writing lab is a good example -- as is the multimedia teaching facility in classics that allows students to view the places Homer  talks about and see the cave where the sybil uttered her mysterious pronouncements.


3. The physical structure of computing  continues its rapid change toward a distributed and networked system.


Many of us who were around when computing began on U.S. campuses in the 1950s and 1960s, remember making daily visits to the central shrine -- the computation center, bearing our gifts in the form of trays of punched cards.  How happy we were when we got answers back in 24 hours. 

Nowadays instant response at one’s desk is the rule.  Computing has moved out of the central locations to the classrooms and laboratories.  Work that cannot be done on site is done remotely in -- more or less -- real time.  Students and faculty members prowl the Internet -- UT is the second largest user in the country -- searching for books in Princeton’s Library or communicating with fellow students in England, Germany or Japan. 

The demand for e-mail addresses on this campus is phenomenal.  Additional lines and ports have to be installed constantly.  A number of teachers this fall have required that all written work be submitted electronically.  A committee has been formed, somewhat belatedly, to try to anticipate and prevent abuses as students, staff and faculty members experiment with the changes in academic life that networking  produces.  Can you sell football tickets via e-mail?  Can you make a date?  Can you r wife who works at Motorola send you a “honey-do” list of what to get at the mall on your wa y home from work?  Can you use a pseudonym on the network?  Who is this fellow who has been writing notes to people and signing them J. Christ. Nazareth? 

The changing physical structure of academic computing continues to make profound changes in the way the University operates. 


4. Human services for academic computing are becoming more distributed as well, but they lag behind physical changes.


A rule at UT-Austin as along as I can remember is “Megabucks for equipment, but not one cent for personnel.”

This is an exaggeration, of course, but it is true that the distribution of human services in computing has lagged behind the distribution of equipment.  All our buidlings now, I believe, are served by optical fiber networks.  This does not mean, however, that those who live and work in those buildings can take advantage of the new channels that are theoretically available.  In many places this simply means that a fiber optic cable passes through the tunnels under the building.

At a recent meeting I said that many faculty members and students are no better off than pigeons sitting on a telephone wire -- they can feel the tingling in their feet as the signals pass beneath them, but they have no access to the information. 

Our people need equipment, but more than that, they need help.

It was one thing for a professor to come into a classroom and find no chalk and no eraser for the blackboard.  He or she could do something about that as a rule. 

But come into a computerized classroom and find that half the screens are dark,  and the average professor  faces a much larger problem.  Ordinary fallbacks won’t work.  The teacher needs help -- right now and right there.

A call to a distant and mildly interested voice at the Computation Center won’t cut it.

What’s to be done?

Providing a distributed system of human services in support of academic computing is vital to the future of the University.  We need people to teach the teachers.  We need people to maintain and supervise the labs.   Staffing the university of the future increasingly means staffing with people who can provide competent and friendly  advice and service to students and faculty regarding our computer systems.


5.  Our hybrid administrative structure for academic computing continues to function -- but strains are increasingly apparent.


Responsibility for academic computing at UT-Austin is difficult to pin down. 

Department chairmen, deans, the head of the computation center, the director of the general libraries, the Faculty Computer Commitee, an assortment of vice presidents, the president,  the chancellor of the UT-System, and the Board of Regents,  all have a say in what goes on.  Territorial disputes occur.   Efficiency and performance suffer.

Duplication of effort abounds.  Sharing is difficult.  Planning is complicated. 

The surprising thing is that the procedure continues to work, although it is increasingly strained.  An ad hoc committee to advise the president, the Faculty Computer Commitee,  serves as a strategic planner for the campus.  Ideas originating in college computer committees arrive there for study and analysis. Recommendations on courses of action flow to the Administration from the committee and subsequent responses are evaluated by the committee.  Last year’s recommendations to the president ran to 400 pages in three volumes.

The over-all plan for campus computing -- the so-called Vision Plan --  was written in 1989 and provides for a rolling three-year look ahead for all the colleges and the computation center.   Financial support was provided initially for plans generated in Pharmacy and Liberal Arts.  The recent infusion of student fee money at the rate of $7 million a year means that plans for instructional computing can go ahead in all of the colleges simultaneously, at least at modest levels of investment.  Deans and college committees have become more interested in polishing their plans now that the prospect exists for at least some annual money for everyone.


6. Serious problems remain concerning what needs to be done about research computing on the campus.


Academic computing began at UT Austin as research computing.  And it is certainly true that the much more extensive uses of computing we now see around us had their beginnings in the ideas and insights of research scientists.  It seems obvious that we need to continue to make an investment in computing research and development in all fields.

But where is the needed money to come from?  The venerable Available University Fund  is shrinking as a source for innovative and expensive projects.  External funding for computers and computation is in short supply these days.

Students want their fee money to go for teaching labs now -- not for applications that may or may not affect instruction in some distant future.

The Center for High Performance Computing -- the supercomputer -- is a case in point right now.  Launched by the Regents in happier days as a central source of high performance computing for all  component institutions, it now faces probable shut down in three years.  Its $3 million budget was cut to $2 million this year.  Free time was curtailed for students and faculty members, engendering difficulties for everyone concerned.  Next year the budget goes to $1 million.  And the following year it goes to zero -- unless we can come up with a feasible plan for research computing that will enable the Center not only to exist, but to grow and prosper.

What should be the nature of that plan?  Jim Browne of Computer Sciences is heading a subcommittee of the Faculty Computer Committee to come up with ideas. 

My feeling is that the matter is extremely important for the future of The University.  And I am sure that Dr. Browne would welcome your thoughts.


7. UT-Austin’s future is limited only by our imagination and ingenuity.


If I have stressed in this talk more problems of academic computing than accomplishments, then I apologize.  Our University has been and continues to be a national leader in the field. Truly wonderful  things are being done -- and more are on the way. 

* The large student computing facility  in the Flawn Academic Center will open at the end of January.  It is a remarkable place indeed -- the first fruits of the student academic fee -- and I think it will come to be heavily used and greatly appreciated by everyone.  Be sure to visit it.

*Our University continues to have more Macintoshes in use than any single institution in the world.  Our Microcenter store is one of the best and biggest facilities of its type anywhere.  Buying a computer there is like buying a  cookies at a  bakery.  So heavy is the demand for services, you have to take a number when you enter the store, and heaven help you if you came without your identification card.

* Distance education via computerized multimedia services is expanding rapidly at UT Austin.  Nearly every college in its plan for the future  includes plans for offering courses at remote locations via these services.  Some -- such as engineering, pharmacy, business and education a re already doing so.  The impact of the university on the life of the state and region will be greatly increased by these efforts.

* Our library system is one of the nation’s leaders in automating library systems and services.  The new UT-CAT system to be released later this year will amaze you with theextent and speed of its offerings and the depth of information it will now provide.   The next step is electronic document delivery, and planning for this is going on now.

*Multimedia.  That’s a catchword we hear often these days.  What it means is that information increasingly will be delivered not only in letters and numbers, but in charts and graphs, in color as well as in black and white, with sound and motion.  These changes will have major impact in instruction in all fields.  Do you want a slide of Raphael’s “Madonna and Child” from the art library’s collection?  No need to go there and check it out.  You will be able to have it delivered electronically to your desktop computer or the computer in your classroom. 

*Experiments in wireless networks now in progress offer the promise of much more flexible uses of computers in the future.  Imagine classrooms where students can connect to  networks using their own laptop or handheld computers.  What interesting sessions could be held.  What stimulating questions could be asked and answered.

What vast ranges of knowledge could be surveyed.

In this regard, I learned this fall that more information now is stored electronically than exists in printed form.  At our own Center for High Performance Computing, we store 3 terrabytes of information.  That may equal all the information contained in the 5 million plus volumes held in the General Libraries.

The future of the university is limited only by our imaginations and our ingenuity.

That has always been true.  The difference now is simply that the future is especially bright and interesting because of the increased power provided by the new technology.

A comparison I like to make is between the invention of movable type in the western world and the invention of the computer. 

The printed book was invented in Germany by  Johannes Gutenberg in about 1450.  In the first 50 years after its invention,  the book  changed western society in profound ways.  

Scholars call that 50-year period the cradle period -- or incunabla -- of the book.  I think that we have had the privilege of living through a similar cradle period of the computer, the second half of the 20th century.  In the last decade of the incunabula of the computer, we are witnessing social change that equals or exceeds that introduced by the invention of printing. 

What will the future bring for the university?

My wife LaVonne heads up new technology efforts at Casis Elementary School in Austin.  Not long ago she told me that a class of fifth graders at Casis decided to write a letter to President Clinton.  They did so on their classroom computers.  And they sent it to him via e-mail and the internet.  Furthermore, the president got the message -- or his office did -- and the students received a reply to their questions via the network.

A simple matter, certainly, but somehow it stuck in my mind.    But how different all this is from elementary education in the past.  What will these young students be capable of doing with computers and information systems by the time they come to us as freshmen?  I guarantee that they will be ready for us.  Will we be ready for them?

Well those are my seven points.

I’ve just about exceeded my information capacity point for the evening.

I’ll be happy, however, to try to respond to any questions you may have.


How we got here -- 40 Years in the Wilderness

Early days at Stanford — the 1950s

The importance of being lazy

Only 6 computers needed for entire country

Stats was it — no conception of use with words

Programming in machine language

North Carolina — the 1960s

Univac 1105 and the 1960  census

John Kerr’s visit

Experiments with text — concordances

Attempts to put newspaper in computer

First computerized edition 1964

Complaints from the profession

Cru-isers, Gol-dwater and Mousek-eteers

The  demise of  the printing craft unions

University of Texas — the 1970s

The 1970s:  Linotypes out/computers in

The Daily Texan goes electronic in 1973

Something for the blind students

Content Analysis and computers

Can computers read and understand?

Artificial intelligence emerges

The Revolution of the 1980s

The first desktops arrive

What is this thing called word processing?

From doing science to doing teaching

Project Quest — seeding the campus with new ideas

Campus backbone network — speeding up service

The business office — firewalls

A library for all of Texas

Research —100 years of the LAT and NYT

The 1990s --Computers for Productivity

Computers in the classrooms and offices

The SMRF

The Microcenter

E-mail for everyone

Retired Faculty and Staff, alumni go online

The Internet  -- gift of the American universities

Tenet — Texas

Ask Alice — Columbia

The media lab — MIT

Gopher — Minnesota

BASIC — Dartmouth

YAHOO — Stanford

Mosaic-Netscape — Illinois

The faculty computer initiative at UT

Can we talk?

Where are we today?

Online services 

Compuserve

Prodigy

America Online

The Internet  — It’s not the same thing

Computers talking to computers —  what an odd idea!

Is it mass communication or not?

So many connections  — society’s brain

Surfing the  net with Netscape

Who pays for it?

What about advertising?

Multimedia — what is it?

What’s out there in cyberspace? — Everything

Example:  the weather

Example: our Trip to Paris

Example: OJ transcripts

Example: UT sports  — the OU game

Example: The Daily Texan

Example: The coffeepot at Cambridge

Example: The A&M bonfire

Example: The  Fruit Fly — The Human Genome

Example: Religion

Who benefits? -- Nearly Everybody

First Graders slide show

Scotty beam me over  — pen pals in Norway

People with handicaps — Robert Burns, Morgan Watkins

Retirement?  what’s that?

keeping track of money

meeting new friends

keeping in touch — e-mail

personal pages

genealogy

being creative

Greater Austin Area Telecommunications Network

UT

AISD

City of Austin

Travis County

LCRA

ACC

State of Texas

What linking agencies  electronically means

The fiber optic city — high speed information for everyone

Should Austin consider this?

What should minimum configuration be?

Being information rich and information poor

Should information cost money?

A Carnegie Library for the world

What happens next?

Earning a living in an information society

The neighbors across the street — Austin as a suburb of SF

Going on leave at home

Publishing on the internet

Committee reports

Is job a disappearing concept?

Free enterprise  — the greatest market in the world

Can’t do intellectual tasks? — You’re in trouble

Gathering information

Do we need newspapers?

Do we need the post office?

Do we need libraries?

Do we need TV?

Do we need radio?

Do we need film?

Show electronic camera

Will everyone be a journalist in 2010?

Do we need the other professions?

law

medicine

architecture

business

engineering

teaching

library science

education

fine arts

psychiatry

religion

Drowning in information — what’s the answer?

bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terrabytes

Intelligent agents — content analysis again

Personal librarians

Personal editors

The power of groups

What happens to community?

Living in a chat group

The loss of privacy

Dealing with intruders — flaming

Predators on the net

New forms of theft

Can we do business this way? The NYT says no

Should the government be able to snoop?

What about encryption?

The reinvention of reading and writing

Do nothing until I call you Monday

E-mail and the grandchildren

Phoenix and Guam aren’t so far away

The on-line office hour

Electronic submission of papers

Study groups on line

Committees in cyberspace

The electronic library

The electronic university  — accreditation report

Dr. D.’s Helpful Hints

Goodbye, Gutenberg

The Book

Invention of the book in the West 1450

The Incunabula — 1450-1499

The Computer

Invention of the Computer in 1950

The Incunabula — 1950-1999

Coming out of the wilderness at last

Cities of the plain?

Glimpses of the promised land?