Time-share computer services at St. John's University

I have found an astonishing thing, which is, that we can represent all sorts of truths and consequences by Numbers (G.W. Leibniz, “The Art of Discovery,” 1685)

Cam machines think? Allan Turing once asked this question. It is not my purpose, here, to offer an answer to this question and engage in the current controversy between M. Minsky et al and H. Dreyfus, but rather to offer an interpolation of this question: Can Machines (prompt) Thinking? The Data Center which I began at St. John's University came into being as a result of my own experience in a think-tank at the University of North Dakota in 1970.¹ This think-tank was an oblong room set aside for persons preparing batch computer jobs in mathematics and physics. Typical problems like finding order 4 semigroups or rocket launch simulations, for example, were restructured to permit computer searches and representations. That was a good room to be in. Seemingly novel procedures and approaches were taken to familiar problems—representations of them with numbers via the computer.

In 1972 we started with 2 terminals in a Physics seminar room at SJU; there were online to the University of Minnesota. It was the beginning of a think-tank reminscent of the one at UND. Student and faculty interest soon out-paced the capacities of our 2 terminals. Then, when considering the possibility and the cost of expanding to 10 terminals connected to the U of M, we instead, introduced on-campus systems capable of reaching across the upper midwest to supply our needs.

The other services we supply to our campus users, and, to some extent, our off-campus users, are secondary totally to this primary one, the introduction of a think-tank wherein thinking is prompted by machines.