Today, students are found working on laptops everywhere from dorms to classrooms to College Green. Students check their email repeatedly throughout the day and submit papers online via Blackboard. However, in 1985, this reality was still just a vision.
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Vice Provost for Computing David Stonehill imagined future students “bringing their own computers to school, or buying them while they’re here — we won’t require that.” These computers would permit students to use better word processing programs, unlike on typewriters where, “you can’t insert, you can’t delete, you can’t change or interchange the order.”
He said that creating a network for computers across campus would be “complex technically,” and that for each dorm to have a computer, the price of computers would have to come down first.
Stonehill also conjectured that “Electronic mail ... is going to be very interesting for a student to use.” He believed electronic mail would be an especially important development, causing people to “communicate in much less formal ways.” For example, Stonehill predicted: “Where we now write two pages, what we tend to do in an electronic mail service is write at most a paragraph and usually a couple of sentences.”
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