A Brief History of Social Sciences Computing at Duke

Until the early 1990's, social science computing was closely tied to mainframe computing. Social scientists tend to use a variety of general and specialized statistical packages, many of which originated on IBM mainframe systems. The two most widely used packages were SPSS and SAS. The latter originated at North Carolina State University under the sponsorship of a federal grant from the National Institutes of Health. Interestingly, one such package called TSAR was developed at Duke and was in use during the early 1970's until it faded into obscurity as other packages came to the fore.

The mainframe suited the needs of social scientists. The cost of licensing expensive package software could be shared, mainframes provided adequate memory and processing power, online disk space was available for heavily used data sets, mountable disk packs and 9-track tapes provided storage for secondary and archival data and mainframe printing was robust enough to handle voluminous reporting requirements.

In 1965 an alliance was formed between Duke, North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill to create a joint mainframe computing center based in RTP called the Triangle Universities Computation Center (TUCC). This center was set up to address the academic computing needs of the three universities. For many years it was a heavily used and very successful arrangement that served physical scientists and engineers, as well social scientists.

In the late 1970's and early 1980's UNIX computing emerged as a viable alternative to the mainframe for scientific computing. With the emergence of the PC in 1980, another line of development began around DOS- and later Windows-based computing. Physical scientists and engineers, who often wrote their own software and wanted to manage their own systems, were the first to embrace other alternatives. The mainframe model of computing remained more suited to the needs of social scientists and there was less disaffection in this constituency. Finally, however, in 1989 TUCC was dissolved, it ceased operation on June 30, 1990 and each campus began to chart its own course.

At Duke the TUCC mainframe was initially replaced by a smaller IBM ES/9000 academic mainframe, which essentially replicated the prior services. An attempt was made to shift users over from the MVS to the CMS operating system. CMS was viewed as computationally more efficient and a simpler alternative to the complicated requirements of learning Job Control Language (JCL) under MVS. This attempt was unsuccessful, however, and was soon abandoned. More users continued to adopt alternatives to the mainframe and there was increasing sentiment to retire it from use because it was requiring a disproportionate share of resources to maintain.

This left social scientists in a quandary because for many the mainframe continued to be a comfortable computing environment, but they were quickly becoming the only academic users. Several developments ensued that finally shifted the course toward the present distributed computing environment.

• The ACPUB UNIX system developed into a widely used, campus system and, with the addition of SAS and SPSS licensing, became a viable option for some social scientists.
• The DukeNet campus networking infrastructure continued to improve, providing a base for distributed systems.
• The Economics and Sociology departments began to develop UNIX systems and have continued to provide leadership and service in this area, with an eye cast on central and shared computing needs. Other areas of more self-contained UNIX excellence have developed in the Institute for Statistics and Decision Sciences (ISDS) and the Center for Demographic Studies.
• Other Social Science units have adopted Novell- or NT-based LANs to serve their basic computing needs, with use of other Arts and Sciences or ACPUB UNIX systems for some services.
• In recognition of the large data set computing needs of social scientists, in 1994 an investment was made in a read-write, optical jukebox system with a 57GB storage capacity. This was integrated into the ACPUB system and then remotely mounted on other UNIX systems across campus. While this system has since been retired, it provided, at a critical juncture, a place to house Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) archival data and some large user workfiles that could not otherwise be stored on local systems.
• The Office of Information Technology (OIT) was formed in 1994 as the central campus computing agency, a director arrived in 1995 and a clear mandate was finally given (with requisite budgeting) to consolidate and improve computing at Duke,.
• The College of Arts and Sciences formed an Office of Computing in August 1993, appointed an Assistant Dean to direct it, and gave this office a mandate to develop structure, consistency and accountability within Arts and Sciences. In the social sciences this has been reflected in attention to technical staffing, annual equipment budgeting and central management for shared resources (such as classroom AV equipment) and specialized services (such as web development).

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