Entering the Digital Age

While the digital age was in its infancy, Harvard began incorporating revolutionary technology into campus life, bringing word processors to Houses for the first time in April 1983.

The ten coin-operated machines located in Mather, Currier and Leverett Houses—which cost $4 an hour to use ($3 with tokens)—allowed students to write and correct text documents on screens, as well as perform basic list and mathematical functions.

The processors, donated by the Digital Equipment Company—whose founder, Kenneth H. Olsen, famously said that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”—were Harvard’s baby steps into the computer age.

“Depending on how this whole operation is received, we may eventually order more word processors and experiment with additional projects such as personal computers,” Mark van Baalen, an official in the office for information services and technology, said at the time.

A few weeks after the installation of the word processors, the College began offering 20 to 30 percent discounts on IBM computers to students for the first time, setting up a showroom of $2,500 to $4,000 models on the sixth floor of the Holyoke Center.

“What was beginning to happen was that universities recognized the importance of getting computing in the hands of students, and the computer companies were recognizing the importance of capturing the student market,” said former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68, who is a computer science professor.

Ken Kozikosski, then-manager of the Harvard Computer Store, was less sanguine about Harvard’s entrance into the computer market.

“I don’t think an institution that is in education should be in the retail

business,” he told The Crimson reporter at the time.Meanwhile, computing power was being harnessed in new and inventive ways around campus.

The freshman housing lottery used punchcards and five separate programs to put first-years in their preferred residences in only 13.9 seconds. This move stirred fears of bias toward alumni children and athletes, and the card-sorting process was overseen by two students to “check everything themselves, if they wish,” said Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67.

The football coaches used computers to analyze the offensive tendencies of their opposition, using statistical methods on “hit charts,” formation, and down and distance information. The digital revolution even reached the Harvard-Yale rivalry, with Harvard a few years ahead, but a Yale defensive coordinator boasting that within a few years, they would “have a system à la the Dallas Cowboys.”

A student at the Graduate School of Education, Diana Gagnon, took advantage of the available computing power for a study on the relationship between spatial perception and video game playing, having her subjects play games like Battlezone and Targ for hours in Currier House and then take questionnaires.

The Currier House master at the time, Dudley R. Herschbach, noted that video game addictions caused by the study might help House Committees to profit on the game machines.

But the integration of computers into the undergraduate experience was not seamless. Students in an introductory computer science course, Applied Math 110, had to wait hours for terminal time, making difficult problem sets even more time-consuming. In response, the students put together a petition asking for more computers.

As for the ten word processors? The fee for use was lowered to $1 an hour at the end of the semester due to lighter than expected usage.

—Staff writer Maxwell L. Child can be reached at mchild@fas.harvard.edu.