By David Drucker
Daily Bruin Contributor
Although the Class of 2000 may have entered school as members of
Generation X, they arguably graduate as members of Generation
“I””“ as in Internet.
“I’m an older student, and people I’m in class
with just don’t get what it was like before the Net,”
said Gary Aguirre, a returning English student who first attended
UCLA in 1987.
“Everything that you could possibly need is at your
fingertips all the time,” said Aguirre, who is a regular in
one of the 17 computer labs scattered about campus.
Perhaps as a sign of the times, Bruin Online Help Desk
Supervisor Edward Urenda said the university’s more than
50,000 e-mail boxes are accessed an average of 19,000 times per
week.
Jennifer Eskin, a second-year history student, finds the
Internet revolutionary for other reasons.
“It’s such an advantage to be able to log onto URSA
and see up-to-the-minute class information,” Eskin said.
“The thought of having to wait in line and worry about
scheduling classes, especially in a university of 35,000 people, is
just ridiculous.”
Nevertheless, long class scheduling lines and manual card
catalog searches were the norm prior to Internet technology, which
got its start at UCLA.
“There I was, surrounded by computers,” recalled
computer science professor Len Kleinrock, who is widely regarded as
the father of the Internet. “What motivated me was getting
those computers to talk to each other.”
Kleinrock, also chairman of the Santa Monica based Internet
start-up Nomadix, is recognized for his groundbreaking research
into the field of “data-on-demand-access” from computer
networks; commonly referred to in computer science circles as
“packet switching.”
“Packet switching was only one of the manifestations of my
research. The central idea was
“˜on-demand-access,'” Kleinrock said.
Kleinrock said that as early as the 1950s, while still a
doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
his goal was to develop a way for computers to share information,
and to make that information instantly and simultaneously available
from each station within a hypothetical network.
The UCLA computer science department, under the direction of
professor Jerry Estrin, had been exploring the viability of such a
network since 1963.
“It’s difficult to conceive of other projects as
earthshaking as computer networks were,” said Estrin, who
originally suggested that UCLA recruit Kleinrock. “We had an
environment (in the computer science department) that encouraged
graduate students, undergraduates and faculty to try things that
had never been done before.”
On September 2, 1969, that environment helped make history, as
the department’s Interface Message Processor, using a
Honeywell minicomputer as its base, became the first computer to
log onto what is now known as the Internet.
Before Stanford, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah
logged on to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
(ARPANET), UCLA was the Internet.
Estrin said it was difficult to imagine 30 years ago that the
Internet would eventually permeate so many levels of society.
“We were having so much difficulty getting our computer to
work reliably, that predictions had to be kept in the realm of
science fiction,” Estrin said.
Dave Crocker, who graduated from UCLA in 1975, was a student
participant in the ARPANET project, and is considered a central
figure in the development of modern e-mail.
“In 1973, I was describing to my friend the idea of
sitting anywhere in the world and typing messages to people,”
recalled Crocker. “He remembers me telling him that and
thinking how crazy I was.”
“Now, we can do all that,” he continued.
The Internet blossomed into a technological and cultural
revolution, transforming instruction at UCLA.
According to Social Sciences Computing programmer Mike Franks,
all social science classes were mandated as of fall quarter 1997 to
create class Web sites.
But Internet access doesn’t come without a price ““
namely the Instructional Enhancement Fee, implemented in 1997
““ and how the mandatory Web sites are utilized varies from
class to class.
“On south campus in my chemistry and life science classes,
we use the Internet and the Web site all the time and we definitely
get every dollar from the Instructional Enhancement Fee,”
said Scott Murray a second-year molecular, cell and developmental
biology student.
“But I took a GE cluster and Spanish class last year, and
there was no technology, no Web site ““ they didn’t even
post the syllabus on the Web site,” he said.
According to a 1997 UCLA press release, the university
implemented a course materials fee that year to fund the $2.4
million Instructional Enhancement Initiative. The fee ranges from
$2.50 per unit in the humanities and social sciences to $3.50 per
unit in the life sciences and physical sciences departments.
Franks said professors have enlarged their Web sites to offer
interactive learning experiences, including reading assignments
that have links for entering reactions directly in the body of the
text, to on-screen flash cards offering four different views of the
same picture.
“The key here is that there’s a lot of innovation
that’s faculty driven,” Franks said. “They tell
us what they want, and to the best of our ability, we try to make
it happen.”
Kleinrock said he is as surprised as anyone when he thinks about
the broad reach of the Internet.
“I had the notion of its possible accessibility,” he
said. “But what I never imagined was that it would penetrate
society in the way that it did.”