University To Buy 30 Additional Macintoshes

The College has decided to purchase 30 additional Macintosh computers for general student use--including word processing--and should have the machines installed by the end of next month, officials said yesterday.

Although the officials said that the new computers will be accessible to students 24 hours a day, they added they did not know where the new Macintoshes will be housed.

The new computers, which will be ordered within the next two weeks, may be placed in extra rooms in Leverett and Currier Houses or in the West Terminal Room in the Science Center, said Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III.

If the Macintoshes are placed in the terminal room, there will be increased competition for them because students will be able to use them to access the Harvard computer system as well as for personal use, said Lewis A. Law, director of computer operations.

Using the terminal room "won't be an optimal solution, but a non-optimal solution is better than none at all," Law said.

Law said he has been trying unsucessfully to find space for the computers since the beginning of the school year.

Although the Faculty has been reluctant in the past to allocate money to purchase computers for word processing, it agreed to spend theapproximately $40,000 for the new machines becausecomputers are becoming more a part of everydaylife, Law said.

The decision "is really recognition of the factthat an awful lot of students are acquiring theirown computers," Law said. "There'll always be somestudents who can't afford them. This is an attemptto remedy that."

While the College currently has 40 computersfor student use in the basement of the ScienceCenter, students in courses which require the useof those computers have priority over wordprocessers and word processing is allowed onlybetween midnight and noon.

Last spring, the Undergraduate Council proposedthat the College purchase computers for wordprocessing use because, they said, there was avast distinction between writing papers on acomputer and using a typewriter.

The Council report went to the Committee onCollege Life which okayed the proposal to purchaseand set up word processing machines for generaluse.

"Through the Committee [on College Life], weunderstood that there was an explicit need forstudents to have machines and we felt that theywere at a disadvantage [by not having them]," Eppssaid.

"There definitely are advantages for a personusing a word processor as opposed to a typewriter.At the moment, it would be impossible to do athesis on a typewriter," said Joseph Konstan '87,a former president of the Computer Society whoworked with the committee on acquiring themachines