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EARLY COMPUTING AT WOFFORD In early spring of 1967, Dr. Dan Olds and Professor Aubrey Hartman of the Wofford Physics Department began their efforts to bring some type of computer time-sharing service to Wofford College. Dr. Olds prepared a proposal outlining his ideas on why it would be a good thing to bring Wofford into the computer age. In April of 1968, Wofford received its first computer terminal, which was used to dial in to a timesharing service provided by G.E. in Atlanta, GA. In August 1968, the G.E. Service was dropped and service was switched to Call-A-Computer of Raleigh, NC. This service provided Wofford students with a computer timesharing facility until July 1975, when the Wofford Witch, a PDP-11/40 minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corporation, was purchased with a generous grant from the Hoechst Corporation. Read Dr. Olds' Proposal, from Dan Olds' personal collection (396k PDF) Timeline Of Obtaining Timesharing, from Dan Olds' personal collection (60k PDF) Beginning in 1968, Dr. Olds produced a newsletter, "Terminal Talk". Frank Anderson, the Wofford librarian, drew the masthead for the newsletter, modeling it after punched paper tape. Many thanks to Dr. Phillip Stone, the Wofford Archivist in March 2004, and his staff, for taking the time to scan these newsletters and making them available for this web site.
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