Last Wednesday, manager of IT desktop client services Warren Belding retired from the College after more than 43 years of service. While at the College, Belding witnessed several transformations in technology, and simultaneously saw his own position evolve in order to continue to meet Dartmouth’s technological needs.
Belding first joined the College’s IT department in July of 1972 when he was 21-years-old. It was his first major job out of college, and also his first experience working with IT. Most of his training came while on the job, he noted, especially because the field was constantly changing and evolving.
Originally, Belding worked in the machine room with the mainframe computers. At the time, personal computers had not yet been invented — professors and students at Dartmouth shared a single computer, large enough to take up more than half the floor of the now-demolished Kiewit Computation Center. Over 100 people could connect to the mainframe at a time via terminals in the center or other buildings on campus, computer science professor Scot Drysdale said. Belding worked to help users run their programs, performing tasks like mounting magnetic tape and getting printouts.
After two years working in the machine room, Belding applied to and was accepted for a position as a program librarian. He compared the job to a modern-day software download page: he maintained a collection of computer programs for people to use if they did not want to write their own. Belding said that while on the job, he was in charge of verifying that user-submitted programs for the collection were not copyrighted and could be used publicly, as well as deciding whether programs were worthy of inclusion in the library. He and his coworkers would also regularly produce a catalog detailing the available programs in the library.
In the 1980s, Belding’s role changed once again with the advent of personal computing. His job became focused on providing user support, a role he has maintained to this day.
One of his first duties was helping to introduce personal computing to the Dartmouth campus. Drysdale said that the head of computing at the time, Bill Arms, who is now a computing and information science professor emeritus at Cornell University, was convinced that the future lay with personal computing, rather than with continuing to purchase larger and larger mainframes. As a result, the College began looking into offerings from Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Apple to purchase for students. They also began work on creating a campus network that students could access on their computers from their rooms, Drysdale said.
Ultimately, the College decided to purchase Macintosh computers from Apple in 1987. Belding was involved in purchasing, setting up and distributing computers to Dartmouth students. He said that for many years, the College used Macintoshes exclusively and did not introduce Windows to the campus until the 1990s.
After, Belding continued working in a similar role, though the details of his job varied over the years. Before his retirement, he was involved in working with administrators to provide desktop support, traveling to their offices or communicating over the phone or email to help them with technical issues. While working in this position, he was known to carry around a “traveling office” full of CDs or flashdrives to assist with troubleshooting — the IT equivalent of a handyman’s toolbox. He said about five or six staff members were involved in similar positions, while another group was dedicated to faculty issues, and a third group helped student workers provide aid to other students.
Though the College is where Belding has worked the longest, it is not the only Hanover community that he has served. For 29 years, Belding worked as an on-call firefighter with the Hanover Fire Department.
Hanover Fire Captain Bert Hennessy said that an on-call firefighter has much the same role as a volunteer firefighter, helping to assist in fighting fires within the local jurisdiction, though they are paid a small amount. Today, there are about five on-call firefighters in the area, he said.
Hennessy, who knew and worked with Belding for around 15 years, described him as a dedicated and excellent on-call firefighter who gave a lot back to Hanover. He said that Belding was very community-oriented and was always interested in helping out.
“When we needed an extra set of hands, we could always count on Warren,” he said.
Though Belding retired from the fire department four or five years ago, Hennessy believed that firefighting was very important to him, adding that he thought Belding would have been a firefighter if he had not gone into computer services.
Today, Belding is looking forward to retirement, which he intends to spend traveling with his wife and spending more time with his children and granddaughter. At the same time, he will miss the people he has met at Dartmouth, he said.
“I’ve built up a lot of really nice relationships with the people I’ve worked with,” he said. “As far as my years with the College, that’s probably what I’m going to miss the most.”
