Page 126 - Universitas Terbuka Center of Excellence In Asia 2010 and The World 2020 (A Journey Towards a Leading Open and Distance Education Institution 1984-2008)
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Development of Infrastructure and
Hardware
UT was founded in 1984 as the only state university which operates as a
single mode distance education system . It has been established as an effort to
increase higher education capacities , referring to the early decade of the 1980s,
the higher education acceptance capacities in state and private universities was
only about 125.000 new students ; while senior high school graduates were close
to 500.000 students. When UT first opened its registration, the number of
enrolling students was more than 40.000 students, although it was planned to
accept only 15.000 students. In order to manage the data of 40 .000 students , it
was impossible to do it manually; therefore , since it was founded UT had applied
information technology. Before UT had enough computer facilities , data
I
processing was carried out by Universitas Indonesia Computer Centre (Pusilkom
Ul). In addition, UT staff projected to be in charge of data processing were
prepared and trained by Ul staff. Along with the use of super mini-computer for
data processing , UT also used personal computers (PCs) for preparing masters
of printed learning materials.
While the information and communication technology has rapidly developed
from time to time, UT has made adjustments and has used various kinds of series
of super mini-computers, i.e. Data General Desktop 30 , MV 4000, MV 8000, and
MV 15000 for student data processing . Due to the increasing expenses for
maintenance of super mini-computers at that time, the increasing capacities and
cheaper prices of PCs, in the early decade of the 1990s, UT decided to migrate
its data processing system to PC-based with Client Server architecture. In the
early development, UT -LAN backbone was built using coaxial cables in the speed
of 10 Mbps. UT -LAN network used server with Novell Netware operational
system using IPX/SPX protocol. The running applications on UT-LAN were
developed in DOS-based. One of the weaknesses of using coaxial cables among
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