The Divinity School moved out of Wesley Hall in 1959 making room for the Psychology and Philosophy departments, as well as the College's Computer Center, housed in a space less than 2,000 sq. ft. on the first floor, south side. These were the years of the MAINFRAME, when a single "large" computer served an entire organization. 'Jobs' were submitted, one at a time, typically on cards, and users would return some time later to pick up the results, printed on foot-wide pages. (Often the print-out revealed a "fatal error"of some sort, requiring the user to correct and resubmit).
The college mainframe, at this time, was no doubt the vacuum-tube based IBM 700. It was, of course, not connected to a network, and its use by the Psychology department was principally limited to data analysis. When, in 1963, the Center moved to its own building, the mainframe was an IBM 7072, a transistorized system. The SDS Sigma 7 arrived, and with it timesharing, in the early seventies; followed in 1976 by the DEC-10. This enabled a connection to the ARPANET. ARPANET eventually became the internet, but was originally designed by the Defense Department to facilitate communication and data-sharing among scientists and universities. Department members initially used the facility via telephone connection and terminals specially installed for the purpose.
In the meantime, mini- and then micro- (personal) computers began to revolutionize our labs.
The Department's first minicomputer, the DEC PDP-8, was installed in its own room on Wesley's fourth floor
in 1968. This computer was over seven feet tall, but had only 32K of memory (!) Its input and output
was limited to a teletype printer. Soon came (in the Stevenson Center) the more powerful PDP-11 which had a video display
terminal. Joseph Lapplin, its principal user, has said this allowed research on motion perception
that he couldn't do before, and that his research "really took off".
This section under construction.