Information Technology Center (ITC) Records

The Information Technology Center (ITC) was inaugurated in fall 1982 as a joint effort by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to produce a distributed personal workstation network, which would integrate all campus computer users, eliminate the heavy demand for terminal timesharing, and offer direct access to the university’s full information resources. The result was Andrew, a multiple-process, multiple-window environment based on the Unix operating system and designed around IBM’s Token-Ring network concept. Andrew was jointly named for university founders Andrew Carnegie and Andrew W. Mellon. Under first director James Morris, the ITC’s initial five-year plan to create a prototype university computer system was implemented by a 33-person team of IBM and CMU personnel. The arrangement offered the ITC -- and CMU’s Computer Science graduate students -- access to IBM technology and staff, and gave IBM early (and even exclusive) access to ITC-developed technology. Product rights and licensing were shared by IBM and CMU. Initial ITC funding costs were divided at $6.3 million by CMU and $20 million by IBM. The vast network achievement did not occur without dissension. Students, especially those in the Humanities, were chagrined at having to pay for Andrew-supporting personal computers which they felt they would never use after college. Student activist groups protested research project secrecy necessitated by the competitive computer industry, and also a perceived funding preference for the ITC over other academic programs. The attitude that CMU was being co-opted by its corporate funders was widespread. Development of network protocols and user interfaces were primary goals for the early ITC. The staff was spilt to address these dual aspects of the Andrew system. The VICE (Vast, Integrated Communications Environment) initiative developed the distributed Andrew File System (AFS). VIRTUE (Virtue is Reached Through UNIX and EMACS) developed the system’s Window Manager, which evolved, in turn, into the B(ase) E(nvironment) 1, BE 2, Andrew Toolkit (ATK), and finally the Andrew User Interface (AUI). Educational software development was also a critical goal for a university hoping computer availability would permit a three-year Bachelor’s program -- and, incidentally, a response to the computer usefulness issues among Humanities students. In cooperation with CMU’s Center for Design of Educational Computing (CDEC), the ITC initiated a university-wide Scholars Work Bench (SWB) project to review the input of programmers, students, teachers, researchers and administrators regarding their design needs in instructional applications. One of CDEC’s productions for the new online Andrew system was CMU Tutor (later CT), a programming language and environment that coached the faculty’s computer neophytes in writing sophisticated educational software. Another educational application, Cahiers, allowed History students to examine the politics of 18th-century France. Disappointingly for both CMU and IBM, instructional software production was curtailed through the arrogating of design credit to computer scientists, while the input of educators went unrecognized. Early on, CMU sought to foster dialogue and cooperation among universities using computer networks by creating the Inter-University Consortium for Educational Computing (ICEC) which promoted Andrew, and applications such as the extensible, graphics-oriented Toolkit, through presentations, demonstrations and workshops. MIT’s Athena became one of many university networks offering Andrew applications to users. Likewise, Andrew has incorporated successful applications produced out-of-house, such as the X Window System and, more recently, the Mulberry mail system. The National Science Foundation-sponsored EXPRES project was one among many creators of Andrew-based software for widespread use. According to ITC system designer Tom Neuendorffer, the original ITC staff was an especially talented and fertile-minded group whose pioneering achievements are undersung. Much of their work at CMU developed predecessors to today’s common computer technology, including the imbedding of pictures or other graphics within textual documents; views and imbedded objects in JAVA, an application designed by former ITC staffer James Gosling; E-mail with font capability and imbedded objects (first used at CMU in 1985); and the Messages system developed by Nathaniel Borenstein, who later developed the MIME multi-media mail interchange format. Erecting Andrew into an authoritative university network led to a wind-down and dissolution of the ITC by 1993, following a short-lived name (and mission) change to the Industrial Technology Center. Other factors contributed to ITC’s phase-out: IBM financial difficulties; ideological conflict between researching new systems and creating new applications; the departure of one-half the current staff to the newly formed TransArc corporation. Andrew’s endurance, however, verifies the ITC’s contribution to network development and to CMU’s advancement as perhaps the first online university.