Gym in February. The Knights controlled the ball from the first tip-off, and led all the way to a
78-56 defeat of the rival engineers from Troy. This, their 15th consecutive victory, gave the
Knights a 21-2 overall record and the ICAC basketball title, the third season in a row that the
Knights reached the 20 victory mark. Seniors Brigette Aldous and Melissa Smith led the
Knights with 20 and 18 points, respectively.
Dorm Security.
Over the summer, National Control System's magnetic locks were installed in
Cubley-Reynolds and Ross-Brooks dormitories. Although each of these dorms has four doors,
only two doors in each building were equipped with the new locks. Every evening at 10:00 p.m.
all the doors were locked through a central system.
Any door could be used for exiting the buildings, but people were able to enter those
houses only through the mag-locked doors. Entry was gained by running a student ID with a
special magnetic code through a scanner on the door. When the light on the scanner turned
green, the person was able to enter. However, an additional safety feature involved triggering
an alarm in the Safety and Security office when a door was left open for longer than 30
seconds, thus preventing the doors from being propped open or from having too many people
enter the building at once.
DZ House.
After years of searching, the sisters of Delta Zeta finally located a house suitable
for their sorority, a house on Route 11 adjacent to the Clarkson campus. Under the new zoning
regulations, this site was designated as R4 for group housing.
After the house had been occupied for two years, however, the sisters found that the
renovations necessary to bring it up to code were prohibitively expensive. Neither their alumni
nor their national office could swing the finances necessary for these repairs. As a result, the
house stood empty for several years while the sisters paid the mortgage and the taxes on an
unusable piece of real estate. Then in 1995, the father of a member, Roy Platt, a developer from
Connecticut, bought the house from the sorority so he could "develop" it, and he hired a local
construction firm owned by Donald Thompson, the father of another member of the sorority, to
renovate it and thereby bring it up to code for fall 1995 sorority occupancy.
WISE Partnership.
Clarkson and IBM formed an educational partnership called Workstations
In Science and Engineering (WISE) to ensure that Clarkson became one of the most heavily
computerized campuses in the world. This gift was twofold: first, the outright gift of an IBM
4381 mainframe, one of IBMs S/370 Architecture machines along with all its supporting
peripherals, increased Clarkson's administrative computing power four to six times its former
level. Second, Clarkson eventually was given 190 IBM new RISC (Reduced Instruction Set
Computing) technology RS/6000 workstations, valued at $3.8 million.
In return for these machines, Clarkson was to develop a graphical user interface for
these RS/6000, allowing those unfamiliar with the machine to become familiar with it and its
power. Additionally, Clarkson was to develop a methodology for maintaining a large
distributed network of machines, for all the RISC workstations were to be interconnected with
the University-wide computer network. Further, the University was to develop a system which
allowed easy access to the tremendous quantity of data which these new machines were able to
store.
Finally, the University was to create a Scholar's Workstation, "the Electronic Library of
the Future," which was to put all information needed to do library searches on-line. Card
