Drake University - Quax Yearbook (Des Moines, IA)

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y now, every Drake Student has had some experience with a Mac. No, not the opular fast-food hamburger, Ehough surely there have been ome interesting experiences with hose too, but the Apple Macin- osh computer. It has quickly be- come a permanent fixture on cam- us and proven to be a great aca- emic supplement and aid to all who take advantage of it. Still, it does seem as though some exper- 'ences have been more fortunate han others, and there are still lenty of bugs to be worked out y Dial. Drake's computer-enriched urriculum began in the spring of 986 when the administrators hose the Apple Macintosh as the ampus computer. By the follow- Lng fall, Dial Computer Center nad installed several labs across ampus, including ones in Aliber all, Olmsted Center, Goodwin- Kirk Residence Hall, Dial Center nd Howard Hall. The journalism nd psychology departments also ave mini-labs where students End faculty can work. Each lab omes complete with a monitor who must have enough computer snow-how to help those who were computer literates. The first computer lab systems were fairly simple, comprising approximately 25 Macintoshes inked by Appletalk communica- :ion cables to five dot-matrix Erinters. The computer loaded the rogram into temporary memory, imiting the user to one program it a time. Students and Dial Computer Center found this system to be madequate since the computers pften ran out of memory and mal- iunctioned. Also, the system al- lowed students to save documents nto the computer memory acci- lently, rather than onto their per- sonal disk. Therefore, when the :ompouter shutdown, files saved n temporary memory disap- peared and data was permanantly lost. The fall of 1987 brought new equipment to the Mac labs. Dial doubled the memory of each com- puter, then installed one external disk drive for each Mac and one hard disk drive for every dozen computers, enabling students ac- cess to a greater variety of pro- grams. Finally, two laser printers were installed in the Olmsted lab, enabling students to print docu- ments in near-typeset quality. Students must now show their Drake ID to the lab monitor who enters it into the main computer then issues a disk. This disk is inserted into external drive and the student is given access to the needed programs from the hard disk such as Word 1, Word 3, Ex- cel and Pile. But there are still other prob- lems lingering in the lab. Stu- dents who cannot afford to pur- chase a MAC of their own, or those who don't feel the need to purchase one, are forced to use one of the 90 computers available on campus. This was sufficient until more and more professors began issuing student's assign- ments on the MAC and they be- came popular. Now overcrowding is a common dilemma, especially during midterms and finals, and students often must wait in lines for more than twenty minutes in order to use the MAC. In addition to the over-crowded conditions, the new external disk drives are bulky, loud and slower than the internal drives, and may cause what the computer calls a system bomb, where disks are damaged and data is lost. It is typical for Dial to send about five malfunctioning disk drives back to the manufacturer each month. But aside from all the quirks still in the system, the Apple Ma- cintosh has proven to be an in- valuable resource for students, faculty, administrators, and staff alike. In the near future these problems will most likely be solved and the frustration will cease. With so many people hav- ing access to the system, it may be impossible to develop one that is completely bug free. But even so, Drake must still be considered fortunate to have such a program available. It is because of this computer-enriched program that Drake has clearly jumped ahead of its competitors.