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Welcome Message from the President
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Getting Computerized
In these days of IPOD, Blackberry and Bluetooth, it is hard to remember what ‘getting computerized’ meant back in the 1980’s.
Bill Schoettle, our controller, had the only machine that we called a computer. All the clerical staff used typewriters, most of them electric, to be sure, but still they were just good old fashioned, word processing typewriters.
Bill’s contraption was a thing made by IBM called a System 34 or System 36. It was about the size of a kitchen stove. There was no monitor. It produced a seemingly endless roll of green paper on which was printed what we now call a spread sheet.
The only thing the machine could do was batch processing; that is to say, it could print out all the students grades for the term. You couldn't just look up one student’s grades.
Jack Des Jardins, a member of our board of directors, was chairman of a small company which was manufacturing personal computers. He convinced me that PC’s were the wave of the future, and I bought several for the school. I proudly presented one to my secretary, Cherie Beck. After about a week of frustration, she asked me to take it away and bring back her old, reliable IBM Selectric typewriter.
I quickly realized that just dumping hardware on the staff wasn’t going to do the trick.
What to do? Somehow, I had to find a way to use these fancy new gadgets. Driving through Okemos one afternoon, I noticed a store called Software City. I decided to go in and browse.
It was like shopping in China. I had no idea what all the technical jargon meant. Finally, I asked for some help from the sales clerk. Not wanting to tell him who I was, or what I really wanted, I told him I was the secretary of a bowling league, and I wanted a way to keep track of the names, addresses and phone numbers of the bowlers along with their weekly scores and bowling averages.
“No problem,” said the clerk, and he pulled down a box labeled, “Nutshell.” I told him that if he could show me how to use it, I would buy it. After a short, effective demonstration, I was out the door with $200 worth of software and a determination to get Cooley ‘computerized.’
And so we began a process that governments, businesses, schools, and colleges all over America were spending literally billions of dollars to accomplish. We were ‘getting computerized.’ We were doing it on the cheap.
Nutshell was what was known in the trade as a flat filing system. It was, for all intents and purposes, an electronic 3 by 5 card file, on which data could be stored, sorted, and retrieved. I remember the reaction of Sherida Wysocki, our able registrar, when I first proposed to begin keeping student records on Nutshell. The hub of the registrar’s office was a rotating kiosk on which were kept the ‘blue cards.’ This was a card file bearing the names, addresses, phone numbers, and other critical information about every student who ever attended Cooley.
The blue card was the sine qua non of matriculation at Cooley.
When I told Sherida that I wanted to put all that data on computers, and do away with the kiosk, she turned pale with fright. There was absolutely no way I was going to replace her precious blue cards with some unreliable, unknown, untried, and unintelligible electric hocus pocus.
Undaunted, I began to input data myself. I would go down to the registrar’s office when the staff went home and work often into the late evening and the wee hours of the morning and on Saturdays and Sundays typing student information and setting up the screens that would display and manipulate the data.
Eventually, I was able to persuade Sherida that Nutshell worked by showing her that it was easier to type blue cards on the computer than on a typewriter. The kiosk stayed for another couple of years, but in the meantime, an electronic data base was being created.
In those early days of software development, changes came fast and furious. It wasn’t long before Nutshell was replaced by Nutplus, a relational data base. Soon, I was designing applications for the admissions office and the controller.
Unfortunately, the Nutplus system never reached the sophistication needed for networking among multiple computers. We devised what was known in the trade as a ‘sneaker’ network, meaning that data was transferred from one computer to another by putting on your sneakers, and running from one desk to another carrying a floppy disk.
To be sure, Nutplus worked. It worked a lot better than the pre-computer days. But there came a time when we realized that we needed a networked system. Following my practice of trying to solve problems through the do-it-yourself approach, I immersed myself in a data base called Paradox. I tried to introduce it in the admissions office, and Stephanie Gregg, our dean of admissions, God bless her, put up with the stress and inconvenience of trying to change systems on the fly. It didn’t work.
But our luck didn’t run out entirely. One day I stumbled across a data base called Filemaker. It was able to support a network. It turned out to be a great grandson of Nutshell. We were able to make the transition rather easily.
Getting computerized was a big learning experience for me. It turned me into what my niece called a ‘data base junky.’ Not a usual avocation for a CEO.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004