Information Technology

Support Unit Program Review
Computer Services
Moorhead State College
December, 1973

A. Objectives

  1. Provide keypunching service to support administrative functions of the college, in particular, those functions carried out by the Registrars Office, Business Office, Financial Aid Office, and the Office of Student Personnel Services.
  2. Provide computer programming support for both the maintenance and development of automated administrative functions.
  3. Provide equipment and personnel to process the data and programs developed by Computer Services staff in conjunction with the Colleges administrative offices.
  4. Provide systems development support for those administrative and academic services requesting it.
  5. Provide equipment and personnel to meet the computer needs of various academic programs, e.g., Business Administration, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, Mathematics, New Center, Physics, Psychology, Sociology and others.
  6. Provide programming and systems-development support for the College Librarys functions.
  7. Provide keypunching, operating and programming support so that the College can meet its responsibilities in connection with the State College Accounting and Personnel System.
  8. Be sensitive to ways in which the available Computer Services staff and equipment can assist in accomplishing administrative and academic functions of the College
  9. Be alert to possible ways in which Computer Services can help solve some of the problems of the community in and around Moorhead, particularly as those problems are related to education or to functions of governmental agencies.

B. Clientele Served

  1. Substantial support is given to the following College offices:
    1. Registrars Office
    2. Admissions Office
    3. Business Office
    4. Financial Aid Office
    5. Housing Office
    6. Bookstore
    7. Food Services
    8. Development Office
    9. Library
    10. Student Personnel Services
    11. Printing Services
  2. The following academic departments utilize Computer Services considerably:
    1. Art
    2. Business Administration
    3. Computer Science
    4. Economics
    5. Education
    6. Mathematics
    7. Music
    8. New Center
    9. Speech & Theatre
    10. Physics
    11. Psychology
    12. Sociology
  3. Virtually all academic departments utilize the test-scoring services
  4. The following College offices or academic departments utilize Computer Services occasionally:
    1. Graduate Studies
    2. Audiovisual Center
    3. Biology
    4. Chemistry
    5. Early Childhood Center
    6. Day Care Center
    7. Engineering
    8. Faculty Senate
    9. Student Senate
    10. Academic Affairs
    11. Counseling
    12. Presidents Office
    13. Placement Office
  5. Evident of continued or increased demand for computer services.
    1. Administrative departments are required to produce more detailed reports. Computerizing administrative functions makes such reporting possible with virtually no increase in the staffs of those departments. It does mean continued and, likely, increasing support from Computer Services, however.
    2. Moorhead State College must provide data to the State College Accounting and Personnel System in ever-increasing amounts. This is largely a function of Computer Services.
    3. As academic departments see the need for increasing the effectiveness of their programs, more and more of them find support for such increased effectiveness by applying some aspect of computing to their academic activities. Obviously, this involves Computer Services.
    4. One of the purposes of the Minnesota State College System (as stated in the mission statement) is to "lend assistance to individuals, organizations, institutions, and agencies within the community". It appears that Computer Services may be offered an ever increasing opportunity to help the College fulfill this purpose. The Clay County Treasurers Office and the Auditors Office have already requested the assistance of Computer Services in serving area residents.
    5. Public schools in the geographical area served by Moorhead State will likely be looking to the Colleges Computer Services for assistance in acquiring and utilizing computer terminals. Some area high schools are already being given such help, namely, Moorhead, Borup, Ada, Gary and Twin Valley High Schools. As the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) develops, more and more public schools will be acquiring computing capability.

C. Current Developments

  1. Present hardware capability
    1. On-site computer systems
      1. IBM 1620 60-K system (owned)
      2. Honeywell 115 32-K disk/tape system (leased)
    2. On-site unit-record equipment and other equipment
      1. 1 IBM 026 Card Punch (leased)
      2. 5 IBM 029 Card Punches (leased)
      3. 1 IBM 082 Sorter (leased)
      4. 1 IBM 519 Reproducer (leased)
      5. 1 Moore 300 Detacher (owned)
        Acquired through government surplus
      6. 1 Tab Decollator (owned)
      7. 1 Analog Plotter
    3. On-site computer terminals
      1. 17 ASR 33 Teletypes (leased)
      2. 1 VST 1200 CRT Terminal (owned)
    4. Remote computer systems
      1. Univac 1106 at Mankato
        Accessed via our Honeywell computer system
      2. Univac 1106 at ST. Cloud
        Accessed via our Honeywell computer system
      3. CDC 6400 at Minneapolis
        Accessed via the teletypes or the CRT
  2. Planned changes in hardware capability
    1. To support administrative functions

      2. With the installation of The State College System administrative computer at St. Cloud, it would seem that no large change in local computing power is necessary. However, because of new pricing policies at Honeywell, that firm has offered Moorhead State College a considerably more powerful computer system at virtually no increase in cost. It would seem the better part of wisdom to take advantage of that offer. Appropriate action is being taken to implement such a change within the next year if possible.

      There are some transaction between the college and students that lend themselves to the use of on-line terminals. Reference here is particularly to registration functions and to business office transactions. Further study will be made of the desirability of utilizing such facilities and the wisdom of requesting additional funds to make their installation possible.

    2. To support academic functions

      3. As the number of students and departments utilizing the computer grows, Computer Services must review the quality of the service it provides and make appropriate changes. This process is an on-going one and has in the past resulted in satisfied users.

      Three computer systems presently serve the academic computing needs of the college: 1) the on-site Honeywell 115; 2) the remote CDC 6400 (referred to as MERITSS, the acronym for Minnesota Educational Regional Interactive Time-Sharing System); and 3) the remote Univac 1106 (located at Mankato)

      The Honeywell 115 has been operational since February 1, 1971. It is used to support several Computer Science courses, in particular the COBOL course and advanced courses dealing with computer operating systems.

      MERITSS, the timesharing computer system accessible by students and faculty via teletype terminals or the CRT terminal has been available at Moorhead State since the summer of 1972. At that time the College had five prots (lines to the compute system) and the associated electronic equipment and telephone lines (communications equipment) needed to make them operational. Within the past month changes have been completed which provide the College with nine ports on the MERITTS computer. However, usage had built up on the five ports to the point that often just the most determined users actually got on-line to the computer. Therefore when more ports were added, a backlog of less persistent users took up the slack almost immediately. It is planned that two more ports will be added during the summer of 1974. Plans also include the addition of three terminals (like the ASR 33 teletypes) to provide access to those ports.

      The remotely-located Univac 1106 at Mankato is a large computer system used for processing programs too large for the other two systems. It first became available for use at this College during July, 1973. Up to the present time, that computer has been used mostly for performing statistical processing in connection with two Computer Science courses and with research projects conducted by staff members associated with the College.

      No changes are planned with respect to the service presently provided utilizing the Univac computer system at Mankato.

    3. Funding for computer equipment

      4. As of July 1, 1973, the funds needed to pay for the lease and maintenance of all computer-related equipment have been budgeted directly to the State College Board Office. The man responsible for this budget is Mr. Carl Long, Director of the State College Management Information System. The local Director of Computer Services submits his equipment budget proposal to Mr. Long who then reviews it and ultimately combines it with similar proposals from the other colleges. The adjusted combined proposal is submitted to the State College Board for adoption. The reason given for this variation in budgetary procedure was that someone in a Board Office position could more easily bring about coordination in the acquisition and utilization of computers in the State College System.

D. Staffing Information 1973-74

  1. Operators

    2. There are presently 2 keypunch operators, one of whom works three-fourths time. The other one does numerous other secretarial tasks in addition to keypunching. Consequently there is, perhaps, 1.25 full-time-equivalent (FTE) keypunch operators. There is one full-time computer operator and two part-time student operators (.6 FTE).

  2. Programmers

    3. At the present time there are three full time programmers. Most of the work is applications programming but a considerable amount of systems programming is also done.

  3. Administration

    4. There is .4 FTE devoted to administration of Computer Services in the person of the Director. In addition to this he serves as chairman and teacher in the Department of Computer Science, statistical consultant, and systems analyst in the development of computerized systems.

  4. Appropriateness of staff

Both as to training and performance in their positions, all resent employees are excellently suited. All of them have been in their positions long enough so that they are well aware of ways in which preset functions are carried out and come up with ideas about how the department can assist other departments in performing their functions.

It is likely that another computer operator should be hired in order to meet the demands of an increasing work load resulting from more and more local applications as well as from the developing State College Accounting and Personnel System. An additional operator would make it possible to do production runs at hours of the day when program development is not utilizing the computer systems.

For the same reasons given for increasing the computer operator staff, and additional keypunch operator may be needed. This will depend to a great extent on the size of the increased work load produced by the developing State College Accounting & Personnel System.