Despite the recent financial woes of Apple Computers, including a reported loss of $120 million in the 1996 October to December fiscal quarter, Dartmouth Computing Services officials say the College will continue to be a predominantly Macintosh campus.
Much of the reason the College is sticking with Macintosh goes to Dartmouth's long history of using Apple computers, according to Director of Computing Larry Levine.
The College chose a Macintosh platform in 1983 and joined Apple Computer's University Consortium a year later.
Since this decision, the College has designed many of its network tools around Macintosh, Levine said, and switching would be a very costly and time-consuming endeavor.
"Even if you wanted to, you couldn't move from all-Mac to all-Windows in a week," Levine said. At the very minimum, it would take three years to change all student computers over to Windows, he said.
Levine said starting a mixed-platform environment would introduce "many more problems and complexities."
For instance, if many members of the next freshman class began using non-Macintosh machines, the rest of the campus, presumably still using Macintoshes, would face many communication problems with the new group of students.
Since the College decided on the Macintosh platform in 1983, the majority of the campus has remained with that computer brand with only a few exceptions.
For example, just 30 or 35 out of several thousand students at the College currently have computers which use the IBM-based Windows application and there are 500 to 600 Windows machines on the entire campus, Levine said.
"Where it has made sense to bring [Windows machines] in and support them, we did that," he said.
For instance, the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration uses some Windows-based machines because the business world is dominated by the PC-based operating system.
Even so, the great majority of campus is Macintosh, and Levine called this homogenous computing environment a strength -- because it allows networking, exchanging files and support services to work more smoothly than in a dual-platform environment.
Because most of the campus uses the BlitzMail e-mail program, exchanging files is very simple, he said.
Levine said the College provides users with better assistance because the support personnel do not have to split their time between two different operating systems. They also become more proficient in the area in which they work.
Chris Leon '98, a Help Desk consultant at Kiewit Computation Center, said a predominantly Macintosh campus makes providing help to users much easier.
He said diagnosing and fixing problems with Macintoshes, especially over the phone, was much easier compared for other types of computers.
Although the business world is dominated by Windows and Intel-based computers, Levine said he did not think the College was doing its students a disservice by familiarizing them with Macintosh computers.
"I don't think it will hurt or slow students down significantly," he said. The World Wide Web, for example, is improving noticeably in terms of platform independence, he said.
Levine added that common applications like word processors and spreadsheets are becoming easier to use on both Macintosh and Windows-based machines.
Even as the College is firmly committed to Macintosh, Associate Director of Computer Consulting Randy Spydell said there are some new professors and administrative offices who opt for Windows because certain software packages are not available in the Macintosh format.
Although Dartmouth has no immediate plans to start encouraging use of Windows computers, Levine said Kiewit is "already increasing support for those machines in administrative and some academic areas."
Spydell said he thinks the College is "miles ahead of places that are trying to support two or three platforms."
As for the reason why Apple's share of the computing market has been shrinking, Levine said the company really "never dominated the market in the first place."
Apple's share of the market is currently at six percent, down from the nine-percent share where it had hovered, Levine said.
The new availability of Apple "clones" might also have accounted for Apple's drop in the market by claiming some of Apple's previous market share, he said.
