HISTORY OF THE SAİT HALMAN
COMPUTER CENTER

Computers have been used to assist education at Robert College since 1977. One of the original computers that existed at the school was a Wang. 10 Sinclair Spectrum machines arrived in the early 8Os and were housed in Mitchell 104. The Halman center, as we know it today, came into existence in 1985. The facilities of the present center were donated by Mr. Talat S. Halman as a memory to his son Sait Selim Halman, who was tragically killed in 1983. His son showed great promise in Computer Science and so it was a fitting tribute.

- April 1985 The Halman Computer Center was officially opened with 12 Apple Ivies of 64K memory.

- The equipment available in the Center in 1987: there were 24 Apple IIEs.

- In March 90 an Amiga 500 was purchased.

- An IBM PS/2 model 30 was bought. There were new plans to buy 2 good printers to service the Mac, Amiga and the IBM.

- In 1994 Apple IIes were replaced with 24 NCRs.

- Although Robert College was not able to get an internet connection of its own due to limitations of the Bebek santrali, the school was able to reach an agreement with Bogazici University, who provided the school with several administrative dial up accounts and web space. Robert College got its first web presence on the Bogazici University server with the address http://www.boun.edu.tr/~robcol and several administrative users began to make heavy use of the email addresses provided by the University.

- With the connection of the school’s local network to the Internet, Robert College was running its own WWW, FTP and mail servers on campus. The school was able to provide email addresses for all faculty, staff and students as well as personal file server space and local network accounts for all as well

- The computer center consisted of 3 labs large enough to accommodate 24 students in each room. Two of the labs were equipped with PCs and the third was a Mac lab. There were about 15 computers on the same network in the library and a growing number of computers in offices which were also linked to the same network.

- The school entered the new millennium with about 250 computers with well-established network, in excess of 1200 user accounts (mail, local file servers ...) and a growing farm of servers.

In the Spring of 2003, duties related to computing services were separated into Technical and Academic. During the Summer of 2003, major upgrades to the network, the servers and most workstations set Windows2000 as the standard.