NJIT Was Early Leader in Giving Microcomputers to New Students in 1980s

Personal computing evolved from the primordial soup of electronics miniaturization in the 1960s-1970s, and before long the revolution was at full strength in University Heights.

Mainframes and servers still handled administrative and research tasks in the 1970s and 1980s, as they do today, although now most computing hardware is located in external data centers accessed through the cloud. NJIT's succession of large machines following Newark College of Engineering's first IBM computer purchase in 1962 included an RCA Spectra 70, Sperry UNIVAC 90/80, various models of Digital Equipment Corp. VAX, and many servers from IBM and Sun Microsystems, according to Peter Teklinski, who was a student here from 1979-1983. He started working in computer services as a sophomore and never left, still working here in the Information Systems & Technology (IST) department today. But if you wanted to know what was the future in 1975, the answer was microcomputers.

It was a symbolic changing of the guard in 1972 when the engineering school awarded an honorary doctorate degree to U.S. Navy Admiral Grace Hopper, known throughout the annals of computer history as the mother of software engineering. She attended Hartridge School in Plainfield, N.J. (today Wardlaw-Hartridge in Edison) and led an industry committee to develop the COBOL programming language in the 1950s. Her name has since become synonymous with large mainframes, yet the must-have technology purchase of the 1970s was a pocket calculator. It would run circles around your slide rule, and unlike hobby computers of the mid-1970s you didn't have to solder it together.

Pocket calculators were expensive and hard to come by in their early days, so the NJIT library offered desktop calculators that students could use, as arranged by professor Murray Turoff who was known for leading the university's increasingly popular Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES).

In January 1975, the same month as Newark College of Engineering became NJIT, the cover of Popular Electronics magazine proclaimed that hobbyists could build their own microcomputers rivaling commercial systems. That was an exaggeration, but it's well-documented that the article inspired Harvard sophomore mathematics major Bill Gates to leave school and form a startup company initially spelled Micro-Soft. Hobbyists and engineers worldwide found similar inspiration, and one of the earliest home computer clubs formed in Scotch Plains, N.J. that spring. There were surely NJIT faculty and students who rode the same wave.

A student chapter of the Association for Computer Machinery was first mentioned in a Nucleus yearbook in 1979. The chapter ended, although it's unclear when, and according to ACM officials it reformed in 2004. A women's chapter formed in 2015.

An industry milestone happened in 1977 when personal computers stopped being merely kits and started being pre-assembled home appliances. The next few years saw the rise of plug-and-play home computers from Apple, Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, Texas Instruments, Sinclair and many others. There were plenty of faculty and students who started bringing their personal computers into offices and dorm rooms during this time. Students formed an informal club called the Micro Users Group in the early part of the 1980s. Their main activities were chatting through EIES, playing computer games, and socializing, said former group vice-president Jim Ruskowsky, who now works in pre-sales engineering for Dell. The club's office had an Apple III which was a business-oriented computer. "It didn't get a lot of use," he joked. They group also sold floppy disks at discount prices, they wrote in the 1987 Nucleus yearbook.

By 1983 the college administration made a crucial decision: all incoming freshmen would get a personal computer. "The Vice President has put together a request for information which would start the process of negotiations with computer companies to provide large numbers of microcomputers at reduced student cost," minutes from the April 6, 1983 Board of Trustees meeting state.

That decision was controversial, according to Fordham University graduate student and future NJIT Dean of Students Leroy Thomas in his 2004 doctoral dissertation, Expediency, vision, and leadership: factors in the development and growth of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 1881-2002. Thomas explained, "The board noted that Stevens Institute of Technology had already implemented such a program. The board authorized the distribution of microcomputers to all incoming freshmen, starting in the summer of 1985. [Saul] Fenster said it was probably the most important single decision made by the Board in the history of the institution. It was part of the plan to become a more computer intensive campus, said Fenster. Although NJIT received critical acclaim for such a decision, there were also a few negative comments from some students and parents who felt that the upperclassmen would be paying for computers used by freshmen."

Fenster said it was probably the most important single decision made by the Board in the history of the institution

A cover article in the Dec. 7, 1984 issue of the Vector student newspaper added that the computers "will be funded through a tuition and fee increase somewhere between $200 and $400. The increased charges, scheduled to take effect next fall, will apply to all of the Institute's 7,000 students at the school, although fewer than 1,000 freshmen will receive the machines."

"As a result, Fenster had the university prepare a paper to explain in detail the plan for academic computing. The paper, On Becoming a Computer Intensive Campus, outlined in detail the university’s plan for being both responsive and influential to technological change. The paper made note that NJIT was presumed to be the first public institution in the nation to take such a step. The board later authorized the purchase of personal computers for transfer students in 1987," Thomas continued.

The computers were various IBM PC clones, Teklinski said. For some time there was a policy that students would be given parts and taught how to build their computers, rather than just being handed working machines. It was also around this time that computer department staff began wiring the campus with Ethernet, he added. Teklinski's own first computer at home was a Tandy-Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 4. He wrote terminal emulation software in order to access college systems from home.

Frank Aversa took out a $5,000 student loan to buy his own PC. Just like Teklinski, Aversa started working here after graduation and still does. "My first full-time employment at NJIT was running the PC distribution program with two other people. NJIT would buy all the parts in bulk and there would be a half-day session, three groups of 10-plus incoming freshmen," he explained. "One in the morning and one in the afternoon run all summer until every freshman had a PC. We would bus the students to the 240 King Building, now closed. There we would have a 90-minute session on the assembly of the computer and testing some smoke and sparks. The remaining session would be the installation and use of the computer's software, edit a document, run a compiler. Early on, PCs did not have hard drives except for floppy disks. All the programs ran on two floppies, one for the application, one for data."

"Each year we would get better, faster computers," Aversa continued. "The PC assembly program ended when it was getting difficult to buy parts. Buying an assembled PC was more cost-effective due to mass production. The last two years of the distribution program we purchased assembled computers. We hired a group of graduate students to disassemble them into kits for the freshmen to reassemble them. After that we gave out complete PCs. ... The last step after assembling and testing was to place the NJIT PC logo plate on the PC."

"The program finally ended, because most incoming freshmen already had a better PC than we could give them," Aversa said. "Then the program changed to software distribution, much of which is still offered today. Most people concentrate on the hardware in the distribution programs, but it is important to note that the software that NJIT provides to the students has always been a valuable asset. Often the software cost more than the PC."

Developments continued in the 1980s and into the 21st century. By the early 1980s the university started replacing wood-and-paper card catalogs with an electronic version from Computer Library Systems Inc., which ran on backend computers from DEC and terminals for user access. It's unclear exactly when NJIT installed that system, but it was here since at least 1983, long-serving library officials said. The next evolutions were software from Data Research Associates in 1992 and then Endeavor Information Systems' Voyager application in 2000. Digital projects librarian Matthew Brown said the current system was installed this summer by a company called Ex Libris, which merged with Endeavor in 2006. The back-end software from Ex Libris is Alma and the user interface is called Primo.

NJIT opened the Center for Computer-Integrated Manufacturing in 1985 and was named America's most-wired public university in 1998 by the former Yahoo Internet Life magazine.

"Between 1997 and 2000 there was a 66.4% increase in the number of students in computer science-related programs at the university. As of 2000, students in these programs comprised 27% of the total enrollment. The university developed a proposal for the new college and had it reviewed by the Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. The ensuing report, along with other research done by university administration confirmed the need for such a college. The board therefore approved the establishment of the College of Computing, effective on July 1, 2001. The Department of Computer Science was merged into the new college," according to the Thomas dissertation.

The new college took on the Ying Wu name in 2016 to honor the Chinese entrepreneur from the NJIT class of 1988. Wu received his master’s in electrical engineering here and worked at Bell Labs. He founded Starcom which became UTStarcom, one of China's top networking companies, where he served as CEO until 2007. Prior to assisting the computing school, in 2005 he endowed a chair to study wireless communications in the John C. Hartman Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

"I've had the privilege of seeing us grow from the infrastructure we were in the 1970s through today," IST's Teklinski observed. "It's been an amazing transition, an amazing journey."

Editor's note: this is part three of a three-part series about the history of computing at NCE/NJIT. Part one is here. Part two is here.