Taking Lincoln into the computer age

Press, 25 February 1986, Page 24

Taking Lincoln into the computer age

Three big pieces of equipment installed In a room at Lincoln College in 1967 took the college into the computer age and biometrician Neil Mountier was given the title of director of the computer laboratory. Now, nearly 20 years later, Mr Mountier has just retired from the college, and is going to Fiji for two years as director of computer services at the University of the South Pacific. He recalls that the first computer at the college — an IBM 1130 with 16K bytes of memory — was “three lumps, each about the size of a desk, but a little higher, around the room.” “That was a small-scale computer, and cost the college just a little less than $200,000; today the college has about $1.5 million worth of equipment,” he said. The college now has three DEC VAX computers, two with four megabytes of memory each, and one, only recently installed, with a memory of five megabytes.

There are now about 100 computer terminals around the college, many microcomputers and word processors, printers, plotters and a laser printer. Mr Mountier was appointed to the college as the first full-time lecturer in biometrics (a combination of statistics and mathematics applied to living things, used in biological science). He took to the college an interest in computers, developed when he was working with the Department of Agriculture (now the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries) in Wellington. “The first computer in New Zealand was brought in by the Treasury in 1961,” he said. “Other government departments were able to use this, and I wrote some programs for my work.” Mr Mountier, until then had been doing his statistical work on a desk calculator.

The Treasury computer was large and primitive, but he saw the potential for making his task much easier.

He found writing programs for the computer “a most absorbing business,” and used to work on these on the train to and from his job.

“Sometimes I would be so absorbed in what I was doing I would miss my station,” he said. He continued writing programs in his early years at Lincoln College, because effective packages were not available then.

“Packages which, on the whole, are pretty satisfactory are now more readily available and many person-years go into preparing these,” he said.

Mr Mountier sees effective packages and using interactive terminals as the big changes for users since he was first involved with computers. Until five or six years

ago input was by punched cards, but now all input is by keyboard at terminals. “Those wanting to input used to have to hand over their punched cards at the counter,” he said. “Then, if someone had put a comma in the wrong place, there might not be a result waiting for them, and they would have to start again.”

When he started at the college, Mr Mountier was in the plant science department as a biometrician.

Then when he was put in charge of the computer laboratory he was both a biometrician and computer director. In the early 19705, the

laboratory became known as the computer centre, and in 1983 the centre became the centre for computing and biometrics, involving both computing and teaching.

Mr Mountier did not mind being both biometrician and computer director. "This was sensible from the college point of view, because the college is still relatively small.”

That first IBM 1130 computer with 16K of memory seems insignificant alongside today’s microcomputers with much greater memories. The 1130 was physically large, and along with a card reader and a printer

took up half of one floor in the first computer centre.

Lincoln College’s first course in computing for students was in 1969. Known as , computer methods A, the course was intended for students working towards master’s degrees. The 20-or-so students on the course were those who needed to use computers in their research. Mr Mountier said com-

puter methods A was still running and each year drew 20 to 30 students.

“Other students came in later,” he said. “When the Bachelor of Agricultural Commerce course was being planned I suggested teaching computers to agricultural economics students in their second year. “That was back in 1971, and computing has been in the agricultural commerce syllabus since.”

Computer teaching at the college expanded in the early 1980 s, and a big move forward was using computers' in field technology experimentation, he said.

This gave agricultural science students computer a experience for the first 5 time. * “Students carrying out a experiments interpret and h analyse results — a very “ rewarding use of com- » puters.”