Early Wizardry

One of the most common reactions I would get in the early days was that Macs were just toys and that REAL people used PCs. We got all kinds of feedback from trustees, vendors and parents. First it was Mac vs IBM, then Mac vs Microsoft, and finally Mac vs Google.  It was amusing to show innovation sometimes to these people.

By 1989, the school leadership had backed the idea of a computer lab. Given that we would not be wiring the whole campus anytime soon, the concept was to create a space where classes and students could go to integrate technology in their learning. Two classrooms in the basement of the science building were designated and the idea was to remove the wall between them and design a technology lab space.

It was really a pretty basic concept of outfitting a rectangle and possibly adding an office for a faculty monitor. We reached out to the architectural firm that had helped design some other buildings and had worked on our campus master plan.

I assumed they had some great ideas and we met once quickly at their offices in Hartford. The architect basically said we are going to knock out the common wall and paint. That’s about it. Get some tables and chairs.

I asked if I could suggest a bit more. They agreed to come to campus for a meeting. They would bring tentative drawings. 

We had already purchased a couple of Mac SE/30s and I had found a program called Virtus Walkthrough. This program for the time was revolutionary. You could select a rectangle tool, create a room of desired dimensions, and then connect other rectangles or rooms. You could add doors and windows and then move to 3D view and add paint or brick texture or whatever to the walls. Then with the mouse you navigated in the door and “looked’ around. The program would simulate what the room would look like, even seeing through open doors and out the windows. Today this is child’s play, but in 1989 it was witchcraft. 

So the architects arrived and we met with the maintenance head as well as several administrators. They had AutoCad on their standalone DOS PCs back at their office and had brought some basic renderings.

I had created three or four scenarios with Virtus, with a central office either in the middle or at one end or with two different sized rooms. So I pulled up Virtus Walkthrough and “walked” into each lab. At one point I just moved a table over and moved a door to a different side. The simulation just adjusted and we toured all the possible rooms. 

You could have picked their jaws up off the floor. I really didn’t anticipate that part of their reaction. We barely discussed the proposed room. They kept saying “make that window bigger”, “move that desk” “let’s come in the other door”. None of them had ever used a mouse or seen anything visual like this. They just walked out shaking their heads holding their paper drawings.

We ended the meeting agreeing that whatever I thought best they would back. We ended up with two rooms, a central office and two L shaped tables with 6 Mac SE/30s in each room.

In 1990 I was asked to attend the 50th reunion meeting of some alumni. Some of these were very influential donors and they were interested in what Loomis Chaffee was doing about technology. 

So I prepared a little presentation talking about the contrast between paper and pencil and where we had arrived and where we were going. At the time, it wasn’t that far. 

I had found another fun Mac application called Morph that took two images and changed one into the other slowly. You could vary the time as you needed. Basically for faces you connected the center of the eyes and resized the images to be similar and then let it work.

Our founding head was a man named Batchelder and as fortune would have it he had a very similar beach and mustache to our then head, John Ratte. So I took those two portraits and set them to morph over 3 minutes.

As I began addressing this august crowd, I put up Batchelder’s picture. I listed what he had started and how subsequent heads had added to the infrastructure of the school. Slowly my words reached what we had been attempting in the 1980s and 1990s. As I got there enough of Batchelder’s face was now clearly John Ratte’s and there were audible gasps in the room and excited pointing.  The rest of the talk was drowned out by shouting and pointing and laughing.

They just started asking what we were planning next and how they could help. I think it was a great moment for the development office.