The students who occupy the Computer Science House, a cluttered and frenetic dormitory at Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology, have a favorite saying: “The future is just a month away.”
In fact, for them, it has already arrived.
The students are among America’s Most Wired. So thoroughly are their lives ingrained in cyberculture that most, like 19-year-old Tom Frazier, find it utterly unremarkable.
“It’s our life,” says the sophomore computer-science major.
Dorm residents–predominantly techies and all but a handful male–spend most of their waking hours in darkened rooms, hunched over computer screens and linked electronically to people down the hall and around the world.
Frazier, who sports a Vandyke beard and earrings, keeps up with his girlfriend in Niagara Falls, N.Y., via pager, cellular phone and the Internet. His jeans have a special pocket for his cell phone, although he keeps it clipped to his belt.
He writes computer code well past midnight, sleeps only three or four hours a night and gets wake-up calls for classes from an alarm on his pager, which doubles as a pocket watch.
Sooner or later, much of the nation will also be networked to the hilt. The boom in wireless phones and pagers, home computers and the Internet–plus the recent arrival of “smart cards” and “digital cash”–all portend a day when life for many Americans could resemble the interconnected, round-the-clock existence that has become routine at Computer Science House.
CSH occupies a single floor in a drab brick building that some students call “The Prison.” It was founded two decades ago as a sort of social club for computer buffs, with a single computer stashed in a closet that barely held two people.
Projects occasionally went awry. In the 1980s an effort to build a “hand-held supercomputer” sparked an explosion and brought the fire department.
In recent years the digital dorm has matured into a sophisticated, student-run research and development lab, a place to tinker when not in class. Two students share each of 32 rooms, all of them equipped with two work stations hooked up to an elaborate internal network–the dorm’s central nervous system–and with superfast links to the Internet.
“Technology is a part of their lives. It’s not a cultural add-on, it is the culture,” says Bill Stratton, a professor of information technology who has overseen the dorm for 15 years.
It is the showpiece of a 13,000-student campus that itself is well-wired. RIT’s main library is tellingly deserted, in part because students do much of their research on-line.
There are no long waits for reserve material assigned by professors, because it is available to all on classroom sites on the World Wide Web. The college ID card doubles as a campus debit card for purchases in the school cafeteria.
When an installment of a student’s scholarship arrives from an outside funding agency, RIT’s computer system automatically deducts any money the school is owed and alerts the student by electronic mail, without any human intervention. Long lines of students waiting to register for courses also are a thing of the past: Courses are added and dropped electronically.
“No one stands in line unless they’re really stupid,” asserts Reno Antonietti, RIT’s associate vice president for academic services and computing.
The Computer Science House is something of an enigma to the rest of the campus. Some detractors view residents as a “bunch of geeks,” says Kelley Harsch, an editor at the Reporter, the student magazine.
Mostly, she adds, they keep to themselves: “Are these guys in their own world, or what?”
One recent evening, computer-generated “techno” music blasts in the dorm’s research lab, as Brian Mathis, 21, checks his e-mail on a $6,000 laptop that he sold his car to buy. The ponytailed sophomore dials up the Internet via a wireless modem and a Motorola cell phone, all to discover he has no new mail.
“Nobody loves me,” he moans.
Mathis is a minor legend at CSH, mainly for creating a Web site two years ago to extol the virtues of Taco Bell fast food. His on-line petition drive to revive the defunct “seven-level” burrito drew more than a thousand responses of support, and the burrito was reborn.
His Web site celebrates the victory and serves up detailed data on, well, tacos.
“It’s a sick fascination,” he says.
Other CSH residents have their own pursuits. One group has rigged the dorm’s Coke machine to electronically track soda temperature, inventory and the credit of residents, who punch in orders for soda on the PCs in their rooms. (Using the Internet while visiting Australia, one resident even managed to make the machine spit out a can long-distance.) A new talking Coke dispenser, dubbed “Big Drink,” is in the works.
Another team is working on DAMMITDigital and Analog Musical Manipulation of Incandescent Technology, software that controls disco lights in the student lounge. More serious projects under construction include a virtual-reality system and a robot.
Elsewhere, other students whittle down the long waiting list of applicants seeking a room in the dorm.
At a 1:30 a.m. session, prospective residents are grilled with such questions as: Can you name a creative use for duct tape?
At about 2 a.m. on a weekday morning, seven CSH residents in half a dozen dorm rooms confront one another in an on-line clash called Warcraft. One warrior quaffs high-caffeine Jolt cola as he struggles to stay alert during a three-hour round of the game.
Down the hall, Micah Modell and Mark Gugliuzza are bidding by computer in an Internet auction run by an outfit called Computer Geeks Discount Outlet. They key in their $24 offer for a “wireless computer mouse,” but are quickly outbid.
In a five-work station common room, Tad Hunt, who is about to graduate, puts the finishing touches on his resume and e-mails it to Bell Laboratories, where he is applying for a job. Then he pulls up his own World Wide Web home page to check his class schedule for the next day; it is always posted on the Internet, so almost anyone can find him.
Conrad Cheslock is an old hand at finding dates on-line. He met Jeanne in the “Flirt’s Nook” chat room of America Online. Conrad zapped his picture to her over the Net. Two months and 20 “chats” later, they met at a mall in King of Prussia, Pa., near their hometowns. That on-line liaison foundered, but he got an A on the paper he wrote about it. Now he dates a woman he met face to face.
“We only e-mail twice a day,” he says.
In another dorm room, Matt “Soup” Campbell checks a Web site for the homework assignment in his computer class. When he completes it, he’ll hand it in electronically.
To remind himself to attend a software study meeting the next day, he instructs his computer to zap e-mail to his pager hours beforehand.
“Don’t forget the meeting!” reads the message.
As plugged in as he is, Soup Campbell is also a little wary of total immersion in technology. He thinks it rude to e-mail his mother, preferring the telephone. He also adamantly refuses to date via the Internet.
“I believe in people interaction,” he says, “and sometimes I wonder if we’re getting away from that.”
