The college centre

Educational Computing Centres, certainly within further education, are of a great variety of types and size. The one thing they all have in common is that like Topsy they just growed. Their growing applies not only to the degree of hardware provision but also to their staffing both academic and non‐academic. None appears to have had an easy birth, their origins usually being due to some enthusiast(s) having ‘acquired’, in some way, a means of card or papertape preparation and having encouraged a local industrial or commercial installation to give free computer time. ‘Cycle stealing’ refers to the bicycle that the enthusiast would borrow from the college compound in order to ferry input or output between the colleges and the computer. After this type of very shaky start courses would become established and the links with the local installation become more formalized. With luck the installation would even begin to charge the computer time and then one was able to show to the local authority that computing does cost money. The college computer usually arrives in some second or third college computing era after sufficient growth of courses and the acceptance of a ‘case’. Where though are the operating personnel ? They so often are absent and our enthusiast is still jack‐of‐all‐trades — key‐punch operator, computer operator, controller, manager and lecturer. Not all will treat their priorities in this new situation in that order, but is there any wonder that educational standards suffer? It is the difficulties encountered in establishing a computing centre that endangers professional standards.