Digital Waves: How Pepperdine computerized
A history of computing at Pepperdine in the twentieth century
This is the first part of a series on the history of computing at Pepperdine.
In October 1991, Pepperdine president David Davenport celebrated the last book to be entered into Payson Library’s computer database. After over fifty years of relying on the old card catalog, the university’s libraries had finally gone digital.1
The celebration was the culmination of an effort launched in 1985, when Payson got its first computer, an HP 3000, and began inputting a database record for each card in the catalog.2 But viewed more broadly, this was the end of a much longer chapter in the history of the university’s relationship with computers. After many years of hard work, by the early 1990s Pepperdine had finally claimed its place among computerized universities.
For decades after George Pepperdine founded his college in 1937, the institution conducted its business on paper: applications, catalogs, rosters, text books, assignments, bills, interoffice memos. Mountains of paper.
In the 87 years since its founding, the university has been forced to adapt to an increasingly digital world. Today, every classroom and every office has a computer. This is the story of how Pepperdine adapted to the information age in the twentieth century, from its first crude attempts at computing to the World Wide Web, email, and the Y2K panic.
From paper to silicon
Computers existed for years before they first came to Pepperdine. In 1964, when a professor of mathematics at George Pepperdine College wanted to write a book about how computers could be used for math education, he had to go to UCLA to learn about computers.3
The first computers at Pepperdine were IBM 1130s purchased by individual departments like the business school and the office of the provost in the early 1970s.4 These computers were operated with punch cards and were each the size of a desk, offering just kilobytes of memory.
By the mid-1970s, the need for centralized computing was becoming clear, especially in the offices of admissions, finance, and the registrar. An influential 1976 report by McKinsey recommended Pepperdine install a $600,000 Sperry Univac 90/60, but it would require quite a bit of space as well as a controlled environment.5 At first, the computer was installed in a trailer, which was less than ideal.6 President William Banowsky asked donor Morris Pendleton to fund a computing center on the Malibu campus, and the Pendleton Computer Science Center opened in July 1977, with the new computer in place. That fall, the Univac generated class rosters, launching Pepperdine into the computer age.
The Banowsky administration had hired Larry Craft to oversee the university’s computerization efforts in 1976. Craft got the ball rolling, overseeing the computer center and introducing data processing to the office of the registrar, but he left Pepperdine in 1979. He was succeeded by James Penrod, a pioneer in university computing who would lead the computerization effort at Pepperdine for years.7
Penrod’s first big job was computerizing the finance department, which had long been a pain point for the administration. By September 1980, Penrod had implemented a digital system for accounts receivable and budgeting, and systems for managing personnel and payroll followed soon after.8 The new systems brought order to the chaotic office and allowed the university to recover payments from a long list of overdue accounts.9 Around the same time, the university hired a computer science professor, who taught students the Pascal programming language using a new computer lab full of Terak computers, which were faster than the Univac.10
But president Howard White wasn’t satisfied with digital rosters and budgets or an isolated computer science program. In a 1982 speech, he announced a new computer literacy initiative at the university, aimed at introducing computers more completely into the life of the institution.11 The Academic Computing Advisory Committee (ACAC) was formed to implement the president’s vision, chaired by psychology professor Clarence Hibbs and including such faculty leaders as Ken Perrin, Bob Gilliam, and Stan Warford. By 1983, the committee was making progress on several fronts, including adding computer literacy to the curriculum, making discounted microcomputers available for students to purchase, and securing a superminicomputer for Payson Library.12
Progress on computerization in the mid-1980s continued thanks to White’s initiative, the work of the ACAC, and the continued leadership of James Penrod and director of academic computing Jack McManus. In the fall of 1984, Seaver College added a computer literacy requirement to its general education curriculum so every sophomore would have to demonstrate proficiency with word processing, literature search, and other basic skills.13 Around the same time, the university completed a long-running project to digitize student records stretching back to 1937, which was made possible by an updated mainframe, the Sperry Univac 1100/70.14
So by the time Howard White was looking for a successor, he had so improved the state of computing at Pepperdine that one observer noted, “The people at Pepperdine are very highly automated. Most universities are trailing behind you in terms of education and computer curriculum.”15 But the university wasn’t happy to rest on its laurels. In 1986 William Phillips, former vice president of academic affairs, called for a computer on every faculty desk, noting that offices with PCs were in higher demand than offices with windows. Funds were budgeted, and the goal was achieved by 1988.16
By the time Payson Library had finished digitizing its card catalog, Pepperdine had essentially accomplished its goal of computerizing the university. Centralized computing had re-made various administrative departments, and computers had infiltrated the curriculum and faculty offices. Pepperdine historian David Baird finishes his account of this period tidily: “Thereafter, Pepperdine kept up with or a little ahead of the curve when it came to computer technology and systems.”17 But this was not the end of Pepperdine’s saga with computers. In fact, it was only the beginning. Twenty years of institutional computerization were about to be disrupted by the introduction of the Internet, which would require another revolution in how Pepperdine operated.
Pepperdine in the Internet age
In the late ’80s, Pepperdine was getting its first taste of what would become the Internet. The career center offered students access to JOBTRAK, an email-mediated job board, as early as 1988,18 and the same year, some Macintoshes in campus computer labs were infected with a virus called nVIR.19 But adoption of Internet technologies would be a slow process.
Email
In 1992, Pepperdine added all faculty members to its email system and began offering email service to students (“a way in which an individual can ‘talk’ to someone through a computer screen”). But only dozens of students signed up for a free account,20 and even two years later, mentions of email still needed to be explained in the student newspaper: “E-mail, which stands for electronic mail, equates to a mailbox inside a computer.”21 Over the next three years, the popularity of email grew, until there were even institutional accounts for the convocation office (convo@pepperdine.edu) and The Graphic (graphic@pepperdine.edu).22
The experience of email at Pepperdine improved over the next decade. In 1995, the campus LAN was extended to the first dorms, meaning lucky students could access email from their rooms rather than having to trek across campus to a computer lab.23 Four years later, Pepperdine ditched its text-based email client Pine for the graphical Outlook system from Microsoft. And finally, the university introduced a spam filter in 2004, winning praise from students.24
Web
Few technologies were more hyped on Pepperdine’s campus than the World Wide Web. All through the 1990s, The Graphic printed predictions about what life would be like in the age of the information superhighway. Students looked forward to a time when the Web would let them rent movies and shop online,25 apply to college,26 buy concert tickets,27 and watch videos of “off-off-off Broadway shows.”28 Faculty dreamt of a future when, in the days after a wildfire on campus, classes could be held online instead of being canceled.29
For many at Pepperdine, first experiences with the Web were mediated by Mosaic or Netscape, early web browsers that showed images inline with text rather than in a separate window.30 There were important lessons to be learned about how to behave on the Internet, including why you might not want to give out your phone number to strangers you meet online (“Eventually I had to stop visiting that particular chat room and it wasn’t until I moved that the phone calls stopped”).31
One of the first Waves to take full advantage of the promise of the Web was Mark Hull, the editor in chief of the student magazine Currents.32 Making use of hyperlinks (“highlighted areas in the article that allow a reader to jump to more information on the highlighted topic”),33 Hull published the 1995 edition of Currents online, winning an award for digital publications and securing himself a job at the San Jose Mercury News that blossomed into a career in digital media.34
Around the same time that Hull was putting together the Currents site, Pepperdine began bulking up its online presence, adding helpful pages for student employment and financial aid. Students were also allowed to craft a home page on a subdomain of Pepperdine’s site. Now archived, the student home pages are so many insects in amber, time capsules from another age, full of rudimentary GIFs and low-resolution JPGs, now-deprecated HTML and antique enthusiasms of the late ’90s: Leslie’s sprint car racing hobby, Jennifer’s thoughts on the season finale of Melrose Place, Alec’s collection of SuperSonics links, Brent’s exploits on the intramural football field.
As students began to use the Web more and more, Internet access in dorms became a priority. The university’s Information Resources department, led by chief information officer John Lawson, installed a system called ResNet, bringing the Internet into dorm rooms, first at Rockwell Towers and the George Page apartments.35 Re-wiring the freshman dorms proved a more challenging task because of asbestos in the ceilings, but the job was completed by the fall of 1999.36
Improved connectivity led almost inevitably to a conflict about whether the university would restrict access to sites it deemed obscene. In the final years of the millennium, Pepperdine considered blocking Internet pornography on the campus network, even trying a commercially available filter for a brief time, but Lawson and the University Management Committee ultimately lifted all restrictions, ruling that the filter was too restrictive, blocking harmless sites as well as obscene ones.37 In place of a filter, the university maintained a policy forbidding abuse of its network, including using it to access obscene material.38
The university’s final technological challenge of the twentieth century was fortifying its network against the much-hyped Y2K bug. As early as 1997, Lawson’s team was working to re-format digital dates in university systems to use four digits for the year in order to prevent computers from mistaking a two-digit representation of the year 2000 for 1900.39 Information Resources coordinated preparations across all university departments, ran tests in 1999, and made an informative Y2K site to get the word out about the threat with cartoon characters conceived by Rick Gibson.40 The Graphic published a special report about Y2K anxieties, full of apocalyptic speculation.41 When the big day finally came, all the hard work paid off—the university’s systems were not seriously affected.42
The Y2K bug didn’t exactly change the digital world forever, but the new millennium would bring plenty of other technological challenges. The ’90s saw Pepperdine getting acquainted with the Internet, but in the twenty-first century the life of the university has become increasingly mediated by computers. From campus protests sparked by anonymous social media posts to degrees offered entirely online, few things have had a greater impact on the last 25 years of Pepperdine history than the Internet.
The rest of this series will cover the history of computing at Pepperdine in the twenty-first century, with special attention paid to the effects of social media on campus and the growing role of the computer in the academic life of the university.
Part two of this series is now available and covers the history of social media at Pepperdine:
Jimmy Fikes, “Library switches from cards to computers,” The Graphic, 3 Oct. 1991: 3.
Parris Ward, “Library installs computer system to aid students in locating books,” The Graphic, 28 Mar. 1985: A1. By November of that year, library patrons were able to use terminals to search for books; see Iris Yokoi, “Payson Library initiates terminals for patron use,” The Graphic, 21 Nov. 1985: 1.
“College Math Department Head Authors Computer Toned Text,” The Graphic, 16 Oct. 1964: 1.
David Baird, Quest for Distinction: Pepperdine University in the 20th Century, Pepp. Univ. Press (2016): 438 (hereinafter, Quest); cf. David Baird, Pepperdine University in the 20th Century: A History, vol. 2, unpublished: 78 (hereinafter, Pepperdine: A History).
Baird calls the machine a “Sperry 9060 UNIVAC,” (Quest: 368); however, photographs show the correct name. Later sources say it was a 90/80, which might indicate it was upgraded in intervening years; cf. Reed, infra note 6.
Scott Grant, “Computer structure underway,” The Graphic, 14 Jan. 1977: 1; cf. Rusty Reed, “Pep competes in computer field,” The Graphic, 11 Feb. 1982: A1.
Baird, Pepperdine: A History, vol. 2: 352. When Penrod left Pepperdine for the University of Maryland in 1984, he was credited with having made Pepperdine’s computer systems “a model for colleges and universities of similar size nationwide.” See Dave McCombs, “Penrod resigns, accepts position at Maryland,” The Graphic, 26 Jan. 1984: A1, A8.
Baird, Pepperdine: A History, vol. 2: 343.
Ibid.: 409–410.
Curtiss Olsen, “15 full-time faculty spots filled,” The Graphic, 19 June 1980: 1; cf. Baird, Pepperdine: A History, vol. 2: 358.
Howard White, “The Future is not what it used to be,” Pepperdine People, 6 (fall 1983): 8–11.
Dwayne Moring, “Group seeks definition of computer literacy,” The Graphic, 24 Feb. 1983: A1.
Sandi Hovsepian, “Literacy policy mandates more computer proficiency,” The Graphic, 28 Feb. 1985: A1.
Baird, Pepperdine: A History, vol. 2: 343–344; cf. Baird, Quest: 439.
Reid Sams, “More data hook-ups expected,” The Graphic, 1 Nov. 1984: A2.
Baird, Quest: 440.
Ibid.
Damon Braly, “Career center offers new student services,” The Graphic, 20 Oct. 1988: A3.
Lori Kremers, “Microcomputer virus found at Seaver College,” The Graphic, 1 Dec. 1988: A1. Note that the nVIR virus probably came from infected disks rather than over a network connection.
Heide Chavez, “E-mail resources left virtually untapped by students,” The Graphic, 30 Sept. 1993: 4.
Erik Gauger, “Government cuts Internet funding,” The Graphic, 19 Sept. 1994: 4.
See Lauren Waldvogel, “Davis brings new ideas to old convo,” The Graphic, 28 Aug. 1995: 2; cf. The Graphic, 23 Mar. 1995: A3.
Austin von Hurwitz, “Just a push of a button away,” The Graphic, 26 Jan. 1995: A6.
Chris Segal, “New university program to filter junk,” The Graphic, 28 Oct. 2004: A7; cf. Daniel Johnson, “Internet smut has its place, just not in my e-mail inbox,” The Graphic, 3 Feb. 2005: A8. Johnson calls the filter “that wonderful piece of software.”
Iliana Rodriguez, “Is Information Highway limited access?,” The Graphic, 27 Jan. 1994: 9.
Greg Lee, “Woodroof releases new technology research,” The Graphic, 17 Mar. 1994: 2.
Leah Shy, “Computer mania, computer maniacs,” The Graphic, 18 Jan. 1996: 9.
Hurwitz, supra note 23.
Leslie Bevill, “Seaver studying new technology,” The Graphic, 19 Feb. 1998: A3.
See Brett Voris, “Students need roadmap to Infobahn: Internet grows leaving Pepperdine in the dust,” The Graphic, 26 Jan. 1995: B6; cf. Ashley Wells, “Internet entertains seekers,” The Graphic, 14 Sept. 1995: 7.
Laura Hicks, “Computer mania, computer maniacs,” The Graphic, 18 Jan. 1996: 9.
See the archived website at Wayback Machine; cf. “Student media joins net surfing,” The Graphic, 16 Nov. 1995: A3.
Ibid.
Armando Barragan, “Currents web site honored,” The Graphic, 12 Sept. 1996: 3.
Danielle Bouvier, “Net access key, Info chief says,” The Graphic, 25 Sept. 1997: A7.
Mark Ross, “Network lets students speed on Internet,” The Graphic, 9 Sept. 1999: A4.
See, e.g., Jennifer Smodish, “Pepperdine pondering porn policy for Internet,” The Graphic, 18 Sept. 1997: A4; cf. Lisa Wahla, “Porno block unsuccessful,” The Graphic, 19 Mar. 1998: 4.
Mark Ross, “Pep won’t filter online porn,” The Graphic, 12 Nov. 1999: A5.
Mark Ross, “Crash of 2000?,” The Graphic, 1 Oct. 1998: A1, A6.
Lora Victorio, “Pepperdine prepares, tests computers for Year 2000,” The Graphic, 11 Feb. 1999: A4; cf. Janea Brown, “Informational Web site explains Y2K problem,” The Graphic, 18 Mar. 1999: A3.
Lora Victorio, “Y2K Special Report: Are We Ready?,” The Graphic, 18 Nov. 1999: C1–C2.
“Computers did not fail on Judgment Day Y2K,” The Graphic, 20 Jan. 2000: A2.