Chronology - 1980s: A Decade of Expansion

1983

In the 1982-83 academic year, Hewlett-Packard announced a computer partnership with UW and gave the university $1,250,000 worth of computer equipment.

In 1983, IBM also announced a $17.5 million research and development agreement with UW. The partnership included $5 million for the purchase of 120 PCs and $5 million over five years for research funding (Ponzo 59).

As part of UW's agreement with IBM, the university received 3 (three) IBM 4341-M02 computers, 24 (twenty-four) IBM 3350 disk drives, 5 (five) IBM Series /1 computers, 120 (one hundred and twenty) IBM Personal Computers, 88 (eighty-eight) IBM 3277 Terminals, 8 (eight) IBM 3279 Terminals, 4 (four) IBM 3272 Control Units, and an IBM 3274 Control Unit. Delivery of this equipment was scheduled to take place through 1983 and 1984.

The stated objectives of the joint project were to expand UW's current emphasis on computing beyond first year mathematics and engineering, expand student's exposure to graphics and colour, extend the network of computing services into student's residences, homes, correspondence course centres, and co-operative student's work sites, and to research the application of UW's computer methodology to an office environment in such areas as image processing, pattern recognition, graphics, voice synthesis, etc. An IBM spokesperson claimed that UW produced one quarter of Canada's computer science graduates and cited the university's reputation for excellence as the reason for the research partnership between the two institutions

UW Special Collections. GA 133-1401. Wes Graham Fonds. Series 4.2: UW Post-1973 Files. University of Waterloo Cooperative Project Agreement: Appendix A, 1-3. (Part of a memorandum dated March 31, 1983, From: Jon Dellandrea, To: Wes Graham.

Wes Graham, Shirley Fenton, Eric Mackie and Don Cowan using a Personal Computer and portable computer on the ARIES network. Photo courtesy of UW Special Collections/Don Cowan.

The Honeywell 6680 computer was replaced by a Honeywell DPS 849 which could support ninety simultaneous users and provide online storage for over 5,000 (Ponzo 52). Bruce Simpson succeeded John Brzozowski as the Chairman of the Computer Science Department (Ponzo 63).

January marked the arrival of the three 4341 mainframes promised by IBM along with a “cartload of other computers.”

DEC donated a VAX computer to CSD.

Research groups in the Mathematics Faculty announced the first two sales of a new software product called Waterloo Maple, which was a language that allowed computers to do advanced symbolic mathematics.

WATCOM Products, a division of WATCOM Inc., was created on June 17, 1983. The new corporate entity was devised to ameliorate some of the difficulties that had troubled the WATSOFT Products, a software licensing group internal to UW. As part of the agreement between the university and the WATCOM Group, WATCOM bought 90% of the shares of WATSOFT Products. WATCOM also agreed to join the new Institute for Computer Research that was being formed at UW.

UW Special Collections. GA 133-1719. Wes Graham Fonds. Series 4.2: UW Files Post 1973. “WATSOFT Proposal” 06-17-1983.

Commodore PET microcomputers in use during a WATCOM hardware design seminar given by WATCOM in 1983. Photo courtesy of UW Archives/Don Cowan.

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