Jim Hancock

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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices - Jim Hancock - 00:02
My name is Jim Hancock, and I was director of the computer center and
computer services here, for 25 years, from 1972 until 1997.
Slide - The first computer, and the punch card - 00:17 
When I first came, there was a used computer that the university had bought
from UNB, and it was set up in Duffy 208, it was the classroom, divided
down the center, the computer is in one half, and our open office was in
the other half, that's how we began. I had one employee Case Hamming, the
chap before me, Charles Dawson—because there wasn't much interest from
faculty—he had developed administrative applications for the student
records and the business office, so in those days, we began with these
things—the punch cards, and everything had to be done in punch
cards—the students who were creating a program, punched them into the
cards, we fed them into the computer and gave the output back to them for
correction. And the same way, the business office, the registrar's office,
they bought punch cards over to the computer to be processed—there was
one computer on campus. Today I dare say that there are thousands of
computers on—everywhere, on campus.

Slide - The NB-PEI Educational Computer Network - 01:29 
Ron McKinnon from Mount A. came over to talk to us—he was doing a study
on computers at maritime universities—and he told me that if we wanted to
be able to attract faculty and students, we had to be connected to the
University of New Brunswick where they were setting up a network to connect
their various schools, so I got invited to a meeting, we made a connection
to UNB, the MPHC was footing the bill for this connection and that was
great because it didn't come out of my budget. And so, we joined them, and
it became the New Brunswick-PEI Educational Computer Network, which went on
for four years—even after I retired it was in existence.

Slide - Net North - 02:21 
The next stage, really was the interconnection of the main computers across
universities, across Canada, which became Net North, and because we were
already connected to UNB, we were part of Net North. It gave me the
opportunity at one point, when I was a representative for the Maritime
Provinces to sit on the board, and as a result of that, I got to meet
people from across the country and to find out what they were doing at
their universities as well, and we had a connection—this is back in the
80s—we had a connection to universities in the US, universities around
the world. People don't realize that this was the beginning and the history
of it.

Slide - Internet: The beginning - 03:09 
And then in the late 80’s, we were contacted with regards to the idea of
setting up an internet. The internet was being set-up in the US and the
national research council wanted to make sure that Canada wasn't left out,
so they chose representatives from the largest university in each province
to come together for a meeting in Toronto, and we began there, and we
decided that we would bring the internet to Canada, by connecting one
university in each province. UPEI, we were not an equal member, by any
stretch of the imagination because we were so small compared to U of T, and
UNB and McGill, and etcetera...But anyway, we attended those meetings, and
it was going to be extremely expensive for us to be able to connect to this
net—80 thousand dollars a year was going to cost us to be part of this.

Slide - Funding Approval - 04:12 
It started in the very first fall that I came, and the first thing I had to
do was to go to Regis Duffy and ask for five thousand dollars, which was a
lot of money back in 1972 for some computer memory. Later on, there were
the things such as—I had to go Willie Elliot with the coming of the
internet, because we were facing an 80 thousand dollar a year bill, and we
didn't have that kind of money, and I told Willie—at the time, I said
"This is not only good for the university, I think it's good for the
province, we have to be there as a placeholder" and I told them that "If we
can't find the money to make it work, I'll pull the plug on it" and I
walked out of his office, and I felt like a giraffe in a sawmill...
Because, my neck was a long way on that one. The other part of it was
upgrading equipment, and every time you wanted to get new computers you had
to go to, and these are large machines, the board to get a major funding
approval, so, at one point, when we were negotiating with our computer
supplier, I told them that I wanted the hardware and the maintenance on
it—the maintenance on this stuff was very expensive, and I wanted it
included as a package. Then I went to Dennis Clow, and I said "I wanna
borrow the money from the university to buy this computer, and I will pay
you back out of our maintenance budget" and that's what we did, so over
about a three year period, we paid back the computer, the maintenance was
covered and then we could go through the cycle again, we could buy a new
computer, upgrade it, and get the money, and Dennis was so helpful and
cooperative—Murray Stevenson, the deans; they saw the technology coming,
they saw the changes and they were all extremely supportive, there's no
doubt about it, and we could not have done it if they had thrown up
roadblocks—they never threw up a roadblock in our way at all for our
progress, so that was fantastic.

Slide - UPEI.CA, First domain in Canada - 06:23 
We managed to join, what became called, CANet, one of the meetings, we
decided what the domain names would be—I came home, and the next day, I
had a list of things to do, one of the first things I did, was to register
upei.ca domain, and it was the first domain in Canada on the internet, and
that was really a number one accomplishment for me, we also had to set up
PEINet, that was going to happen in each of the provinces, and we broke the
rules of CANet, which was that it was for education and research—we
didn't have the organizations here in PEI, so we opened it up to
individuals and small businesses, under the table, and we charged them a
fee, and we had a customer base and we were running a business, out of the
computer center, to provide computer services and network
services—internet services—to PEI. We did that for four years, and then
finally we handed it over to the private sector, and by that time, other
universities were beginning to realize; "This thing was going to be
commercialized" and they handed their facilities over to the telephone
companies and it became the National Canadian Internet, and that's how the
whole thing began, but that's a long jump from punch cards. But that's only
the beginning of the story, because my job wasn't networking, it was to run
the computer center here, to service the administrative applications, the
students, and the faculty—early on, shortly after we got our connection
to UNB, the home economics department was going to get a contract—a major
federal contract—but they had to have access to SPSS, and it was a
condition in the contract, they came to me and they said "What are we going
to do about this?", I said "No problem, we have access to UNB. They have
SPSS" and that was again, the beginning, where faculty began to use this
network connection to UNB, to have access to statistical packages and other
things.

Slide - Computer Science Studies - 08:44
So, Mount Allison at one point changed their name from Math to Math and
Computer Science. I met with Winston Pineau, Chair of Math department, and
suggested "this would be a good way for us to go" and so, that allowed the
couple of courses in programming and Introduction to Computer Science, to
be moved in into the Math and Computer Science department, and that was a
real beginning for our students and faculty and staff, to begin to use our
computer facilities as well.

Slide - UPEI Database Management System - 09:18 
On the administrative side, Maritime Electric bought a computer like ours,
and they were going to set up a database management system. Now, all of our
administrative programs were written in Fortran, a scientific
language—not suited for business at all! So Maritime Electric were going
to buy this database management system and they wanted our help with it, so
I made it as a condition of them helping us that we could be a subsidiary
license, on their main license, and so for a very cheap price, we got
access to a full-blown database management system, and we were able to
convert all of our administrative applications to use that product, and
that was a major step forward.

Slide - Computerizing the AVC - 10:11 
Then, of course there was the vet college, that arrived in 1983. Reg
Thomson said to me, "I want the AVC computerized", and that's all he said,
whatever that meant. Ian Dohoo and I went to a number of universities in
Canada and the US, and we found out that Guelph had a hospital management
system, so they were going to—AVC was going to essentially make use of
that system, but it concerned me because they wouldn't be able to make any
changes to it, so I got them to buy the system for thirty thousand dollars,
so that we owned it. We set it up, we went down and showed it to the
hospital people, and they said "We don't do things like that", "Oh, how do
you do them? Great, we can change it, to make it work the way you want to".
And that was a major step forward for us because—understand, we didn't
know anything about hospital systems, at all, my staff were all new—new
hires—and they didn't know about these sorts of things, so having a
system that we could build on and develop, was a major step for us.

Slide - Equipment & Facilities - 11:27 
In the area of equipment and facilities, as you can imagine, we started off
with this one little computer, and then we replaced that, the fall that I
arrived, with a PD P11 computer. It had 16k of memory, 16k—not megabytes
or gigabytes—K. And I had to go to the Dean of Science to ask for five
thousand dollars, to buy 8 kilobytes of memory to add to this computer.
Today you can buy something like 8 gigabytes for 50 bucks—It is a
millions of times improvement.

Slide - From Wires in Steam Tunnels to Fibre Optic Cable - 12:12
We wanted to be able to connect to terminals and computers on campus—as
those technologies arrive, we ran telephone wires through the steam
tunnels. Unfortunately, if there was an electrical storm and they got hit,
it blew out the equipment on either ends, because they were just wires in
the steam tunnels. Maritime Electric came to us in the late 80’s and they
said: "We want to train some of our installers to be able to deal with
fiber optic cable" and so they said; "Can we do a project with you?" so and
then they would provide the fiber at cost and they would provide the labor.
So, we ran fiber optic cable from the computer center over to every
building on campus—the whole campus had fiber optic—no more problems
with electrical storms of course, because it was glass fibers, and we had
to be among the first universities in Canada to have that kind of fiber
optic network on our campus. Shortly—but, still, within our buildings, we
didn't have the wiring and the federal government came out with a program
to help municipalities to upgrade infrastructure. We submitted a proposal
that would put up-to-date wiring to all of our offices, classrooms, and
terminal rooms into our buildings, to connect to the fiber optic network,
and it was funded, one third by the feds, one third by the province and we
paid a third. So we hired a contractor and they put wiring into all of our
buildings across campus—so we had a very, very well connected campus.

Slide - Printing at UPEI - 14:06 
When we had a terminal room over in Kelly, and I walked in one day, and the
cleaning lady was in there and she just came aboard me and "Look at the
mess around here! There's paper everywhere, the students are so careless,
and they are so wasteful of all the paper. You’ve gotta do something
about it". So I went back to the office and the staff and I sat down and we
chatted about it—we decided we had to charge the students for every page
they printed, and we did. The waste stopped, the rooms were clean, and we
had a little income then, and so we could turn that around and buy upgraded
printers, for all of our terminal rooms and labs, that was a great help.

Slide - Final Thoughts - 14:52 
All you have to do is look around this campus today, everywhere you go,
every room, building you go into; there's computer technology everywhere.
The changes came rapidly, and it was a challenge keeping up with it but
again, with a young, energetic, intelligent staff—they had no problem.
Half the time they were teaching me how to use some of this new technology.
But I was fortunate that I had a young, energetic, talented, bright,
dedicated staff—It didn't matter whether I was here or not, the place ran
and they did the work, and I have to give them so much credit for all that
they accomplished for doing so much on campus. Just to add one little bit,
to close this off, my wife and I moved down here from Toronto—I was
originally from Newfoundland—but we moved down here from Toronto in '72,
we didn't know anyone, we had no family here. But we were welcomed by the
Love’s, the Drake’s everybody on campus—Father Bolger, Father
Cheverie—they made everybody feel very welcome, and I stayed here, not
for anything, the job, yes but for the people, because it was such a good,
healthy place to work, and we enjoyed our time, and we stuck—we’re
still here.