It is virtually impossible to go through a single day at Dartmouth without using a computer.
Computers are everywhere. Students are required to buy them upon matriculating at the College, so professors assume that all students have a computer and expect their students to use them.
"Computing penetrates life at Dartmouth in all areas," said Deputy Provost Bruce Pipes,whose office oversees computing at the College.
Director of Computing Services Larry Levine went one step further in describing the computing's role at Dartmouth.
"Computers and information services are here to provide service to the mission of the College," Levine said. "Their primary goal is to teach and assist in research."
"Computers enable people to do what they do better, do what they do in new ways and do new things, they wouldn't have though of," Levine continued.
Computing at Dartmouth centers around the Kiewit Computation Center. Kiewit has three public laser printers that are free to students. In addition, Kiewit acts as the network communications center and houses the hardware mainframes, Levine said.
The most unique trait of computing at Dartmouth is that all the residence halls, academic and administrative buildings are hard-wired to the network, Levine said. That means all students have to do in order to gain access to the College's network is plug their computers into the wall.
"Everyone on campus has universal network access and everyone has a computer and BlitzMail, which helps the campus cohere," Brown said.
BlitzMail is the College's electronic mail system. All students have an account that they can access from any computer terminal at Dartmouth.
"Dartmouth has become a community of Blitzers," Levine said. "It is a bit of a social revolution. BlitzMail has encouraged faculty-student interaction. Shy students who may not feel comfortable going to a professor's office will Blitz a faculty member."
"It's been a great filter, too," Levine continued. "If a student Blitzes a complex question, the professor can tell the student to come in. If the question is simple, then no office visit is needed."
Even if it is not the most personal form of communication, the campus uses BlitzMail extremely often. Levine estimated that more than 70,000 blitzes are sent each day.
There are also a number of other network services available to College students besides BlitzMail. Students can use the network as an on-ramp to the InterNet, the worldwide network that connects educational, government and business institutions in hundreds of countries.
Students can use College-developed programs to access these various information resources.
Through Online Library and Dartmouth College Information Service Navigator, students can access the Dartmouth library system, the Johns Hopkins University library system, the entire works of Shakespeare and the Encyclopedia Britannica to name a few from the comforts of their own room.
All these resources mean that Dartmouth students spend a lot of time in front of their computers.
"I would be surprised if the average Dartmouth student doesn't spend substantially more time using their computer and information technologies than at any institution we would compare ourselves with," Pipes said.
In a recent survey conducted by MacWeek magazine, Dartmouth ranked sixth nationally for Apple Macintosh computer use among educational institutions, Director of User Communications Nancy Hossfeld said.
The survey was based simply on quantity of computers and Dartmouth was competing with larger schools like Pennsylvania State University.
There are about 10,000 Macintosh computers on campus, Hossfeld said.
"On the whole, Dartmouth offers better access to computers," Hossfeld said. "It is easier to get on the network and more services are available. In general, other Ivy League schools are taking our route and providing more network services."
With all of the network services, it is easy to forget that students also heavily use their computers for more mundane purposes, such as word processing or spreadsheets.
Every Dartmouth computer that freshman purchase comes with Microsoft Word, a word processing program, already installed. And the College holds site-licenses for a number of other commercial programs, such as Aldus PageMaker, Microsoft Excel, SuperPaint and True Basic, Levine said.
Students can copy these programs to their hard drives from the public file server. When students wish to use these programs, they can "borrow" a key from the network KeyServer to run these programs. But in order for the KeyServer programs to work, the computer must be connected to the network.
The only problem with buying a computer is that in one or two years, the computer will be outdated by new technology, according to Marty Moor, director of fiscal services for Kiewit.
Recently, due to the ease of connecting to the network from anywhere on campus, more MacIntosh PowerBook laptop computers are appearing, Moor said. Students bring their PowerBooks to class, to the library and just about anywhere they go.
Upperclass students purchased 700 laptops last year and 500 more the year before, Moor said. She added she expects the demand to keep growing.
Finally, Dartmouth is in the process of trying to upgrade its actual physical computer network, according to William Taylor, director of technical services at Kiewit.
Currently, the College has been using LocalTalk, which transmits data at 230 kilobytes per second. As the College remodels its residence halls, it has been installing EtherNet, which transmits data at 10 megabytes per second, Taylor said.
By Fall term 1994, the Choates and Fayerweather clusters of dormitory halls, along with New Hampshire dormitory will be EtherNet capable, Taylor said.
The College hopes to upgrade the rest of the network, but the project will cost approximately $2.85 million and take about two to three years to complete, Levine said.
