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The Past, Present And Future At U Of Delaware What Is This?
02 Feb The 80s, IBM PCs and UDel! It Came From The 80s!!! Check this relic from the past that I uncovered in the archives: University of Delaware Provost L.
Leon Campbell has noticed a marked change in the conversation at university faculty meetings since many of the humanities professors took part in a special program designed to introduce them to personal computers. Teachers who were used to pecking away at typewriters and some who persisted valiantly in drafting their papers in longhand have discovered the joys and perplexities of computerized text editing. Thanks to the universitys Humanities Computer Projectwhich trained members of the humanities staff and subsidized their acquisition of IBM PCsthe world of computers is no longer the sole province of the universitys science, business and math faculty.
The Humanities Computer Project grew out of the University of Delawares goal to become a leading national center for research in large-scale computer networks, artificial intelligence, architectures and software systems for parallel computer processors, and symbolic mathematical computation.
The university is a state-supported land-grant college that receives millions of dollars yearly in grants from the government and private industry for scientific research. Much of this research, as well as work done in the universitys college of business and economics by faculty and students alike, is done on computer. In 1983, after a 22-month study, the university board of trustees approved a five-year, $12.8-million plan to improve computing at the university and to expand the research and graduate programs of the department of computer sciences.
The plan would gradually replace and upgrade the large computers used by the universitys academic computing and management-information services. It was in this positive atmosphere that Campbell recognized the need for teachers of the humanities to be trained in computer technology. He reasoned that, because of the nature of their work, they had much less opportunity to learn the technology than their colleagues in the science or business fields. He also believed these teachers should be given the opportunity of learning how to use computers to put them on an equal footing with many of their students who were already acquainted with microcomputers by the time they enrolled at the university.
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From: (this particular page) http://saveud.com/the-80s-ibm-pcs-and-udel/
