The modern computer age at Monmouth College began in 1975 when President DeBow Freed appointed math professor John Arrison as director of the computer center; and a series of former classrooms in Wallace Hall were transformed into a center for academic computing and business computing.
Punched cards were the medium for data entry until physics professor Peter Kloeppel (who assisted Arrison at the center) convinced the administration to purchase CRT terminals — much to the dismay of a faculty who were convinced the data should be stored on paper or it could be lost.
Kloeppel, who wrote most of the programming for the center in BASIC language, remembers starting up the system every morning in a long and complicated sequence. The maintenance agreement also required the system to be turned off if the room temperature rose above 75 degrees, which was often the case despite two air conditioners with large windows.
The only disk drive at the time was a removable pack drive the size of a washing machine with a storage capacity of 40 megabytes.
History professor emeritus Bill Urban, who was one of the first non-science faculty to embrace computer technology, credits Arrison for helping put Monmouth at the forefront of academic computing: “He convinced, flattered, and forced his faculty to use the computer in their classes,” said Urban. “As a result, today there are alumni who learned useful computer skills long before a major was offered or word processing became fashionable.”
Richard Reno, who succeeded Arrison in the early 1980s, recalled that his first official act as director of a computer center was to purchase two additional disk drives so that teachers and administrators could each have their own drive; and there would be an extra drive for software storage and backup. The drives used, with a total capacity of 80 megabytes, were purchased from another university for $17,000.
Reno also recalled being kicked out of the computer center when it came time for data processor Donna Brown to print pay stubs. “She was the only one who should have been there,” he explained. “They were pretty paranoid about someone seeing the amounts on the checks.”
Just as Kloeppel had encountered resistance before buying CRTs, Reno felt the wrath of some faculty when he suggested the idea of a campus-wide computer network. “It was a nightmare installing software on every machine, both from a staffing and licensing standpoint,” Reno said. “A network was the only way to manage a growing system, but the faculty feared that students could hack into their machines and steal or dispose of files.”
The idea of a client-server network finally became a reality under Reno’s successor, Daryl Carr. “We installed the network ourselves and laid and buried coaxial cables all over the campus,” said Carr, who retired in 2020. “However, that system was constantly overloaded and was replaced by double fiber optic cables in 1996.” Carr said that that same year saw a milestone in college computer history, when there was finally a PC on every desk.
“There was a time when a significant portion of the campus community opposed learning how to use computers,” Carr noted. “The days of begging teachers and staff to use the equipment are over. Now the tendency of our customers is to demand more and more functionality and bandwidth.”
In the mid-1990s, a strange new phenomenon called the World Wide Web appeared on the scene. Bill Urban recalled in 2005: “President Huseman had been cool with the idea that everyone, including students, should be able to access the Internet. But when President Giese (whose presidency began in 1997) was asked whether general access could now be allowed, he asked the director of the data center whether it was practical; and when he was told it was, we were on our way.
“There were some protests, like ‘How can we stop our students from reading the wrong things?’ But that was the point: we now need to prepare our students to distinguish what is right from what is not, so that after graduation they can operate effectively in a rapidly changing world with ever-expanding information resources.”
The web and social media have changed the way the university markets itself and disseminates information since I joined College Communications in 1992. At that time, press releases were sent by mail, academic catalogs were published only in print, and most of the advertising dollars were spent on expensive TV and radio sports. It took nearly a decade for our first webmaster to be hired, and about another decade for social media to be embraced as a formal way of communicating.
Meanwhile, efforts had to be made on campus to manage bandwidth. Pioneering digital music services such as Napster were blocked from the network. In 2005, the faculties were allowed to receive 50 Mb of storage space, but students were limited to 25 Mb.
Through a partnership with McDonough Telephone Cooperative (MTC), Monmouth’s broadband capacity tripled in 2017 and nearly tripled again in 2018. With the advent of cloud technology, storage problems are becoming a thing of the past.
Jeff Rankin is an editor and historian for Monmouth College. A lifelong resident of Monmouth, he has been researching local history for over three decades.