At its first official meeting, the Computer Science Department decided to celebrate its anniversaries in powers of two years from its inception. Parties were rampant in those early days. However, things are beginning to thin out. This brief history is being written as our most recent anniversary, 2^4 recedes into memory. Now seems a good time to look back and take stock of past sixteen plus years. It was a wild and woolly ride.

Prehistoric Computing
Computer science at Wellesley College reaches at least as far back as the late sixties when two members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty conducted a trial course in automated computation. Using computers in those days meant batch processing at MIT. Things changed in 1969 when Wellesley College rented its own IBM 1130 and began teaching computer science courses using the APL programming language.

Timesharing was the watch word of the early seventies. Wellesley College began experimenting with a part-time port to Dartmouth Timesharing (DTSS) early in the decade. The College continued to maintain several part-time ports to DTSS until 1976. In that year, a National Science Foundation CAUSE grant funded the purchase of a DECsystem-20, known affectionately as DECStar (rhymes with Dexter, where it's @). Throughout the seventies, Wellesley offered one to two computer science courses annually. Enrollments climbed from 48 students in 1972 to 241 in 1979.

Birth of a Department
Realizing the importance of this new discipline, not to mention the importance of exploding enrollments, Wellesley College hired its first full-time computer science faculty member in 1980. Four additional faculty members were added over the next three years.

The new hires dug right in. By the fall of 1983, a computer science curriculum was place. Computer Science 110, taught in BASIC and a Turtle Logo language developed at Wellesley, became one of the College's largest courses. Courses in data structures and computer organization promised to be equally successful. Total enrollments grow to 643 during the 1982-83 academic year.

The Computer Science Department was created in the Spring of 1983, and for the first time Wellesley College could offer students a computer science major. The computer science curriculum consisted of a total of ten distinct courses, although only eight were required for the degree. The first majors would graduate the following year.

Growing Pains
Rapid development of computer science at Wellesley College was not without its problems. DECStar, by now upgraded to a DECsystem-60, was pushing the outer envelop of its computational ability. Access to computer terminals was severely limited and tensions in the single campus terminal room were on the rise. Hiring and maintaining faculty was difficult in the bull computer market of the early eighties.

The Computer Science Department moved quickly to address these problems. In the fall of 1985, the department purchased its first dedicated computer system, a MicroVAX II running the UNIX operating system (originally named Greece, but dubbed Bambam by the computer science majors.) Through a generous grant from the AT&T Corporation, computer science faculty became among the first on campus to have microcomputers on their desks. These machines were networked to DECStar through the beginnings of Wellesley's LAN and College was connected to both CSNet and BITNET, forerunners to the modern Internet. A computer science terminal area, built in the mezzanine of the Science Center Library, promptly became known as Bedrock (Bambam lived there), quickly became home to students and faculty.

Computer Science at a liberal arts college was still new. However, a consensus on computer science curriculum and major requirements was beginning to emerge among faculty at many like-minded institutions. Working with peers through NECUSE and other professional organizations, Wellesley College faculty began a major revision of the curriculum. Computer Science 111 replaced Computer Science 110 as the entry to the major. Pascal replaced BASIC as the first language. Theory and foundation courses migrated from the 300 level to the 200 hundred level in order to provide students a firm grounding in the basics early in their major. Advanced courses such as Compiler Design and Construction, Computer Graphics, and Operating Systems were moved to the UNIX based MicroVAX and were taught using the C programming language. Digital laboratories were created for hardware oriented courses such as Computer Organization and Computer Architecture.

Entering the Nineties
Computing continued to change and to grow. DECStar retired and was replace by a VAX cluster (Lucy, Sallie, and Marcie). The campus LAN was completed and the College Workstation Project put a PC or Macintosh on every desk. Dorm rooms were wired to the LAN, and computer areas were springing up all over campus.

Computer Science by now had outgrown its quarters in Bedrock and Bambam was showing signs of middle age. In the fall of 1990, the International Business Machines Corporation granted the computer science department a half million dollars in RISC RS6000 equipment. Several advanced programming courses were immediately moved to take advantage of this new technology. Planning was underway for yet another addition to the Science Center in order to house a new computer equipped classroom, graphics and digital electronics laboratories, faculty offices and several large workstation areas.

Fall 1991 was hectic. The Science Center Addition opened five days before classes began. Fifteen RS6000 workstations and associated peripherals, central to fall curriculum, had to be installed in the new minifocus. The digital electronics laboratory was only partially equipped. Workstations flickered, operating systems crashed, and network problems abound. Miraculously, all systems went on-line as scheduled. The fall of 1991 was also the beginning of a renaissance in computer science hires. Dynamic entering faculty and staff reenergized the department and offered exciting new research opportunities for students.

While advanced courses moved to the RS6000 RISC stations, Apple Macintoshes replaced the VAX cluster as the platform for introductory students. In the 1992, with the generous support of the Apple Computer Corporation, and with the help of Information Technology Services, the department installed 15 Macintosh II ci color computers into Science Center E101. The old version of CS110, still taught in BASIC, was thrown out and new project-based CS110, taught in HyperCard, developed in its place. Computer Science 111 was updated using THINK Pascal and these revisions began rippling through the curriculum.

At the Start of a New Century
Those early Macintoshes have been replaced several times over by now. The RS6000 workstations too are long gone. With a grant from MicroSoft Corporation and the generous support of the College the computer science has installed the lastest model Macintosh computers for introductory courses and Windows and Linux boxes for advanced ones.

New additions to the curriculum include: Robotic Design Studio (joint with Physics); The Art and Science of Multimedia (joint with Art); Visual Processing by Computer and Biological Vision Systems; Parallel Machines and Their Algorithms; Computer Networks; Databases with Web Interfaces; E-Commerce; and Network Security.

Our introductory curriculum also continues to evolve. Computer Science 110 entered its third incarnation as "Computer Science and the Internet." While retaining its project orientation, the course now uses the Internet as a domain to explore fundamental concepts in computer science. Since the Fall of 1997, Computer Science 111 and 230 have taught problem solving through programming using the Java programming language. Enrollments once again are exploding.
Change remains the one constant. Computer science at our next anniversary will be far different from today. Our department will be too. We look forward to the challenge.