Dartmouth, (June, 1999).
Since 1983, when the College installed the first campus-wide data network, Dartmouth has been an ardent Mac shop. This month, Dartmouth's Computer Science Department will embrace an environment of diversity, thanks to a major equipment grant from Microsoft Research, a division of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft will provide the department with 40 networked high-end Pentium II workstations running Windows NT and a quad-processor Pentium III NT Server. The donation, totaling over $450,000, also includes hardware support and a substantial package of "bundled" user and developer software.
"A mixed environment is ideal for universities," says Professor of Computer Science Bruce Randall Donald, who proposed the project to Microsoft in order to place state-of-the-art workstations on every graduate student's desk. "Windows is the most widely-used operating system in the world. This donation will provide us with modern infrastructure to attack the computational problems of the 21st century."
The addition of Microsoft equipment will add depth to the department's current suite of Macintosh computers, PC's and Unix systems. "Windows NT incorporates a number of significant advances in operating systems technology," says Donald. "Faculty expect that the new machines will expose students to the latest ideas in computer systems and will enable them to carry out computationally intensive research projects."
Donald estimates there are 300 graduate and undergraduate students at Dartmouth involved in computer science disciplines including theory, networking, multimedia, security, systems, robotics, scientific computing, and computational biology.