Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

I was sad to hear (on TWiT episode #188, via Ars Technica), that the University of Virginia has decided to dismantle their student computer labs. Apparently there’s not much of a need for them now that just about every incoming freshman has a laptop.

I have lots of fond memories of my college’s computer labs. As a Computer Information Systems major, I spent a lot of time the various departmental labs: the VAX lab, the word processing lab, the UNIX lab, the programming lab, the multimedia lab, etc. Even once I finally had my own IBM-compatible PC (my freshman year I still had my Atari 800XL), I still spent a lot of time in the lab. It was a community … a place where you could go to work on assignments, get help from other people, or give assistance to others. Some nights, when the “homework” was done I would spend time playing multi-user games like Galactic Trader on the local VAX, or any of the various MUDs on the internet (like AmberMUSH or the one hosted on the Cleveland Freenet … man, those were some serious time sinks for me back then). I even ran my own MUD on the university VAX for a while, a heavily customized version of Monster, written in Pascal.

Later on in my college years I actually worked in the various school computer labs as a lab monitor. I’d have to help the engineering majors with their FORTRAN programs, or the comp-sci majors with their Ada, or C, or COBOL homework, or the math students with their SAS assignments … I encountered a wide variety of people and problems in those labs. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

So it’s sad for me to see that social part of computing starting to disappear. I’m sure not all schools will follow UVa, but I’ll bet this is the start of a trend. Like the UVa post says:

Lab software usage statistics from 2008 reveal that out of a total of 651,900 hours spent using software in the ITC-provisioned public computing labs, 95% of the time (over 619,500 hours), students were running commodity or free programs such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Microsoft Office. All of these software programs come pre-loaded on student laptops or are available at low or no cost to UVa students.

In contrast, just 5% of the time spent running software in ITC-provisioned public labs was devoted to specialized packages such as MatLab, Eclipse, Mathcad, or SPSS.

It’s hard to argue with statistics like that.