The many roles of computing on the campus

Abstract

At Dartmouth College the "computer" has become an essential component of the university community comparable to the library in importance, size, and diversity of application. While such a statement no longer raises eyebrows, in few other cases has the extent of the infusion of computing into the life of the university community been as great, or as painless, as at Dartmouth. The purpose of this paper is to report some of the many ways in which computing has been found useful in teaching and research at Dartmouth, and to claim that these almost revolutionary (though almost painless) developments were generated primarily by having freely available to all students and faculty a general purpose time-sharing system equipped with a simple and easy to learn language (BASIC), and a simple and friendly user interface.