Imagine Dartmouth students walking across the Green with computer screens on their T-shirts. Picture computer displays as thin as a piece of paper.
These innovations, and others like them, may transform life at Dartmouth as we know it within ten years. Dartmouth administrators who work on these issues daily also discussed visions of computerized wristwatches and watching high-definition television on their paper-thin computer screens.
These changes may well affect learning as well as recreation. For example, The design of Dartmouth classrooms will have reconfigured seating arrangements to allow for multiple viewing angles of visual technology, according to Bill Brawley, Spokesman for Peter Kiewit Computing Services
But the changes in technology in ten years are difficult to fathom, although we can predict that storage space and computing power in general will continue to increase exponentially, Brawley said.
Brawley also imagined that current trends would continue. The Class of 2006 preferred laptops to desktops by a ratio of 90 to 10, according to Brawley, and he imagines that this trend will continue until virtually no students purchase desktop computers.
He was less certain about predicting what will happen to the ratio of Macintoshes to PCs. Currently, about 80% of Dartmouth students own PCs, and 20% own Macs.
"I think Mac/PC/Linux competition is really hot right now, and I wouldn't predict past two or three years," Brawley told The Dartmouth.
He expected, though, that Mac and Linux MKT share will become more popular with students, while administrators and professors will continue to prefer PCs.
Brawley is especially optimistic about the state of Dartmouth's network technologies. "Dartmouth is ahead of the game in conversions of its networks. A single network can carry cable TV, Ethernet, data signals and your voice," he said.
"What we envision in the near future are huge advances in wireless technology," said Bob Johnson, Director of Telecommunications.
One new technology will be what is called the soft phone, which attaches to the computer, said Johnson. "Students will fit a headset into their laptop and open up the application. Then they can sit in the middle of the Green and make a free wireless phone call instead of using a cell phone."
Brawley said even a call to China from the Green will be free via the local wireless network.
Another advantage is that students will be assigned a phone number once, and the number will not change during their entire Dartmouth career, said Brawley.
A step toward wireless telephones are the "VoiceOver IP" or "internet protocol" phones installed last summer in the Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority. They exemplify what Johnson calls "converged technology."
The new VoiceOver IP phones will allow for messaging on small screens. "It will be like receiving a Blitz Bulletin on your phone. You will get text and voice all together, reading your email on the phone, and conversely using your voice to send an email," Brawley said.
With VoiceOver IP phones, callers will no longer have to go through a local service provider. Instead, they will make a direct connection to someone else, "without relying on a central brokering authority. It is much more like the internet in its structure than like a phone company," said Brawley.
Because a new phone system costs a few million dollars to install, a simultaneous upgrade is cost-efficient. Epsilon Kappa Theta is part of the IP phone pilot program.
The eventual plan is to replace all the old phones with the IP phones, which will be phased in over a matter of years. The pace of the changeover depends on how much people are willing to pay, said Johnson.
Plugged into Ethernet, they look like regular telephones. Johnson said the next version of IP phones will look different because they will have video screens.
For now, students can look forward to improvements in Hanover's cellular phone service. Students who own cell phones but have left them at home will thus want to bring their phones next year.
Johnson acknowledged the cell phone coverage in the Upper Valley is "pretty awful." According to Johnson, Telephone Services is working with Sprint to install a tower on campus this summer to improve coverage. Johnson is considering a few locations for the tower but refused to disclose them.
The Future, Ten Years Ago
Ten years ago, technology at Dartmouth was a different story--suggesting just how far it may advance in another ten years.
For fun, students played Tetris, SimCity, Poker and Solitaire.
That year,1993, was the year "Jurassic Park" hit movie theaters. Students were talking on a phone system that had been installed in 1981. "Cross-talk," in which a person talking on the phone could hear several other conversations at once, was a frequent problem.
Students would not see a new phone system for another year. It promised to include such features as call waiting, last number redial, and voicemail. They would not have Caller ID, though, and every student would have to change his or her phone number.
Also in 1993, "The Dartmouth" began posting its issues online, but the daily paper was posted a week late and did not include all articles. No photographs or cartoons were published.
The recommended computer for Freshmen was the Macintosh LCIII, with a 12-inch black-and-white monitor. This was an improvement from the previous year's Classic II.
But BlitzMail, in 1993, had been in use for five years already. Dartmouth was sending 72,000 blitzes per weekday, a 33 percent jump from the previous year. In order to accommodate heavy usage of the network, the College purchased a new $20,000 workstation.
By the end of 1993 students were presented with the option to select courses online, instead of bringing a handwritten card to the registrar.
Dartmouth was moving quickly toward a computer-dependent campus. In January of 1995, Deputy Provost Bruce Pipes, said, "We want it to be almost impossible not to use a computer at Dartmouth." Mission accomplished.
So much has changed in the last five years that both Johnson and Brawley were hesitant to make predictions for 2013.
Dartmouth has always been a leader in computer technology, mainly because of a forward-thinking president from our recent past.
In October, 1971, a year before the College began admitting women as full-time students, Dartmouth President John G. Kemeny lectured at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, urging his audience to "stop thinking of man and computer as competitors."
He called the computer the "symbiotic partner" of man. "If libraries are the storehouses of information, the computer is the storehouse of ways of doing things.
"By 1990 the capability we now have at Dartmouth could exist for any home in the United States," Kemeny said. He declared boldly that universities without computers should not be accredited.
Although it's always hard to make predictions, one thing is for sure. Dartmouth students will be able to handle the changes. "Incoming students are far more proficient with their computers generally than what we used to see. We now have a generation of students that has grown up with computers," said Brawley.
