Most UCLA students might find it hard to imagine a life without the various technological devices that they currently rely on: sophisticated cell phones, high-speed laptops and fancy class Web sites.
But before the Internet became a widely used tool on campus, students were required to do a lot more legwork ““ from standing in lines for hours at Murphy Hall to searching card catalogs and book stacks at UCLA’s libraries.
The technological development that now saves students and faculty hours of work was born on the UCLA campus by a UCLA professor and his team of graduate students.
And as the Internet has changed many things about the university, alumni, faculty and administrators reflect on how things used to work and point to many dynamic changes the Internet has brought about.
Doing it by hand
UCLA alumnus Miki Goral recalls spending an entire Thanksgiving weekend searching through microfilms at UCLA’s library, looking for information for her political science research paper.
That was in the mid-1960s, and Goral said, luckily for current UCLA students, things have gotten much easier.
“Now I could do that research from home, drinking a cup of coffee … by simply looking at The New York Times online,” she said.
Now a reference librarian at UCLA, Goral works to give students the ability to use Internet technology to conduct their research by simply typing in keywords.
The Internet has not made research any less of a time-consuming job; instead it has changed the nature in which research can be conducted.
“There is so much more that has been written now; you still have to sift through it to find relevant things,” Cotter said.
“On one hand, you can find things quickly; on the other hand, if you are looking for something obscure, you have many more options to sift through to find it,” she said.
Jim Davis, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer, said that research at universities has been transformed by the advent of the Internet.
“Before the Internet, research was largely theoretical or experimental,” he said. “Now it’s also data- and information-based.”
Research began to rely heavily on internet technology, which involved collecting data and analyzing it, he said.
The Internet allows researchers world-wide to connect, communicate, collect and share information and data, Davis said.
Not only has research been greatly transformed by the growth of the Internet, but the way in which students interact with the university has changed drastically.
University registrar Anita Cotter said signing up for classes used to be quite a laborious process that could have included many hours waiting in line and a number of trips back and forth between professors and administrative offices.
“Twenty years ago, we had lines of people in Murphy and out the door,” she said. “Those days are long gone and we’re all very happy about that.”
URSA online became the way for students to interact directly with the computer system that manages class information for the whole campus. With this system, hours of work are reduced to a few simple clicks of a mouse.
Computers communicating
The UCLA community can thank one of its own faculty for the network of computers that relieved them from daunting research episodes and hours of waiting time.
Computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock helped develop the system that allows computers to communicate with each other.
As a graduate student at MIT, he developed packet switching, which is the system on which the Internet is based.
At that time in the early 1960s, “nobody cared,” he said.
A few years later, though, his research and knowledge proved to be valuable to a growing community of researchers and scientists working on developing new technology under the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency, more commonly known as ARPA.
With many new scientists and researchers from different cities joining the program, their computers had to be able to “talk” to each other and essentially share resources in order for them to work together effectively.
This is where Kleinrock’s packet switching technology came into play. Along with a team of graduate students at UCLA, he set up a connection that allowed a person to log on to and use a computer from thousands of miles away.
In 1969, UCLA was the site of the first node, or computer in a network, in the system of the computers that would grow to become the Internet.
Kleinrock said in a 1969 press release that as computer technology becomes more sophisticated “we will probably see the spread of “˜computer utilities,’ which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country.”
Kleinrock’s 1969 prediction proved to be accurate in terms of the prevalence of this new computer network. What he didn’t realize at the time, he said, was that the Internet was “about people communicating, not about machines communicating.”
“The social impact … became apparent in 1972 when the first e-mail message hit the network. … It dominated traffic on the Internet,” he said.
That’s where another member of the UCLA community comes into the picture. Dave Crocker, who graduated from UCLA in 1975, contributed to the software that made electronic messages readable to different types of computers.
On a team of four computer scientists, Crocker helped to create a standard format for electronic mail. Their developments allowed everyone in the computer network to “get on the same page” for sending electronic messages.
His efforts helped e-mail to become a widely used communication tool.
E-mail usage experienced a drastic increase in the mid-1990s, both at UCLA and throughout the country, Davis said.
Since then, it has served as a convenient line of communication between professors and students.
Sociology professor Ivan Light said e-mail has increased the contact between students and professors.
“I don’t think e-mail has diminished the amount students visit office hours; it has added a dimension to student-faculty contact,” he said.
There is no question that students are using e-mail and electronic resources.
Today Bruin OnLine has almost 90,000 active accounts and “over 90% of undergraduate students use
MyUCLA on a regular basis,” Davis said.
What began as a simple connection between a computer at UCLA and another remote computer developed into a vast network of computers that is now intrinsic to the everyday operation of the campus.
Former Chancellor Charles E. Young said there are various uses of the Internet that allow a university to appear to be smaller to students.
“The Internet has made much greater camaraderie; it allows people to work together and collaborate,” he said, adding that it is an important aspect of a university setting.