Thursday, May 11, 2023

The Daily Bulletin at 30

The Daily Bulletin turns 30 years old today. To mark the occasion, here is part one of a two-part history of the Daily Bulletin, which will continue on Friday.

"There is simply no news"

With those first five words, the Daily Bulletin made its debut on computer screens across campus in the spring of 1993.

Of course, there was plenty of news—enough to fill the pages of the weekly Gazette newspaper published by Information and Public Affairs (the forerunner to today's University Communications team within University Relations)—and the "no news" quip referred to no news about the extremely newsworthy Social Contract talks between Bob Rae's provincial government and the public sector and the impact the coming cutbacks would have on University employees and students alike. In terms of activities on campus, the May 11 news bulletin also announced that James Downey, the University's fourth president who had arrived in April 1993, would deliver an inaugural state-of-the-university address entitled, fittingly, "A Humanist Meets His Waterloo."

A prime example of "Web 1.0," the Daily Bulletin was a pioneering web-based publication that presaged blogs and interactive communication by providing daily stories about University life and issues and encouraging discussion. 30 years and more than 7,400 issues after its inception, the University of Waterloo’s daily chronicle of campus life is still publishing news you can use every working day, whether there is anything to report or not. 

From Usenet and UWinfo to the World Wide Web

In the early 90s, the computing and communications environment on campus looked very different than it does today. Those "computer screens" I mentioned? They were by and large monochrome video display units attached to 'dumb' terminals rather than desktop PCs, connected in a network with servers across campus by a series of Gandalf modems. If you did have a proper PC at work, it might have been a Macintosh, but more likely it was running Windows 3.1 - Windows 95 wouldn't be out for a few years yet. And the University had yet to implement an automated voicemail system for campus telephones - switchboard operators were still connecting calls during business hours. That said, a revolution in communications was just around the corner—a 1992 Gazette article mentions "surfing the Internet"—and many University faculty and staff were already old hands at exploring the ever-growing network of interconnected institutions, post-secondary or otherwise, around the world. After all, Usenet discussion groups had been around for more than a decade by this point.

With the advent of Gopher, an early internet protocol developed at the University of Minnesota, organizations and institutions could deliver text files from a central server to a network of terminals, sharing information from and between databases. In true Waterloo fashion, a committee was launched to discuss how the University might best use this new technology.

The result was Waterloo's version of a "campus-wide information system," dubbed UWinfo. The first UWinfo operations committee, launched in 1992, included Faye Abrams and Mike Ridley of the Library, Roger Watt from the Department of Computing Services (the forerunner to Information Systems & Technology), and Chris Redmond, director of internal communications, representing Information and Public Affairs. Abrams, the head of the committee, managed the library's Industrial and Business Information Service and the interlibrary loan service.

"UWinfo enthusiasts have tried various ways of explaining what their product is," Redmond wrote in the Gazette in November 1992. "It's a bulletin board; it's a library; it's a database; it's a menu; it's a directory. Or try combining those metaphors: UWinfo is a menu of databases, a database of directories, a directory of libraries, a library of bulletin boards..."

What UWinfo was, was a text-based system accessed through a numbered menu navigable by arrow keys. The trickle of online information soon turned into a flood: official University documents; listings of facilities and services, the UWDIR directory of staff and faculty phone numbers and email addresses; access to other servers like FTP and Archie; and indexes of document contents from all available servers.

Most importantly for our purposes though was menu item #8, "Events, News and Weather," which initially contained a listing of on-campus events; select articles from the Gazette, media releases from the UW News Bureau, and weather forecasts. It was menus and indexes all the way down, and if all of this sounds familiar, it should—it was exactly the sort of information you can still find on the University's current homepage, just not on the web, at least, not in 1993.

Chris Redmond hit on the idea of uploading some news briefs to the UWinfo network to supplement the Gazette, and discussed the idea with Faye Abrams to formalize the series of "flash bulletins" that had been delivered via UWinfo - one notable information bulletin was sent out on January 3, 1993 to inform the campus community about the on-campus beating death of student David Zaharchuk.

Thus the Daily Bulletin began as a sort of experiment. "Without advance planning, I posted a four-paragraph news summary to UWinfo on the morning of Tuesday, May 11," Redmond recalls. "The next day I published another roundup, and a third one came on Thursday. I had invented the Daily Bulletin, although that title would not be visibly applied to the five-days-a-week report until July.” The Daily Bulletin was established as number 5 on the UWinfo main menu. He also published the text to the uw.general and uw.campus-news Usenet newsgroups.

The Daily Bulletin was an instant hit, at least among the UWinfo-browsing cognoscenti. Redmond polled his audience to see how far the online publication was reaching, and discovered that within weeks of the creation of the Daily Bulletin, readers ranged from people in spin-off firms on the edge of campus to alumni across Canada to a faculty member on sabbatical in Berlin. 

No sooner had the UWinfo operations committee gotten the Gopher network up and running than work began to implement a successor that you might be more familiar with: the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the very bedrock of the World Wide Web. What distinguished HTTP from Gopher was the former's ability to deliver not just text but images, graphics, hyperlinks, and even video and audio. Patrick Matlock of the Department of Computing Services' Unix Support Group began putting up test websites in 1993, and by November 23, 1994, UWinfo had switched over to the web with a new home page at http://www.uwaterloo.ca/, which required users to use web browsers like Mosaic and (heaven help us) Netscape Navigator to do some serious surfing.

The Daily Bulletin followed suit in the spring of 1995, when the first hyperlink-heavy pages were given a test run. As of Monday, May 1, 1995 the Web version of the Daily Bulletin became the default, though it was still pushing its content to UWinfo and the uw.general and uw.campus-news Usenet newsgroups. UWinfo's gopher went to that big hole in the sky in July of 1996. 

Tune in for Part Two of The Daily Bulletin at 30 in tomorrow's issue.

WUSA and UWSA celebrate the career of Dave McDougall

Dave McDougall in his alter ego as "Someone Important" from the classic get-out-the-student-vote video series run by the Federation of Students in 2011 and 2012.

After over 30 years with the University of Waterloo, Dave McDougall is retiring.

A Waterloo alumnus, Dave started his career at the University in 1991 with what was at that time the Federation of Students (now the Waterloo Undergraduate Student Association) as the Special Events Coordinator. After a brief sojourn as an academic advisor and then a position at Alumni Affairs, Dave returned to the Federation of Students as its Director of Marketing and Communications. He then moved to the Feds' Campus Life department to continue to work directly with students on special events. He went from Clubs Director in 2005 to Clubs and Services Director in 2007 and was later named Director of Campus Life and Director, Student Engagement, his current position.

Dave has held a number of student-facing roles over his 30 years and has made significant contributions in the areas of events, marketing, clubs, services and the overall improvement of student life on campus.

That said, his drive for making our campus better wasn’t just reserved for student life. He also served with the University of Waterloo Staff Association (UWSA). Dave was first elected as a UWSA director in 2018 and served two years before he was named president-elect. He served as president-elect in 2020–2021 and as UWSA's president from 2021–2022, and has been past president since November 2022.

Dave has shown his passion and dedication to this campus and all the students that have come through since day one.

WUSA would like to congratulate Dave on all he’s accomplished on campus over the last 30 years, and wish him many adventures in retirement. A reception will be held to celebrate Dave’s retirement at the Grad House on May 18, at 4:00 p.m. If you are interested in attending, please email to RSVP.

The University of Waterloo Staff Association will be celebrating Dave's commitment to both UWSA and staff members with a drop-in retirement party on May 23 between 12:30 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. at the Health Fireplace Lounge and courtyard (LHS 1656). Please register by May 15 to inform UWSA's catering order and thank Dave for his work with the staff association.

GRT strike over; other notes

The Region of Waterloo is reporting that all bus service, including MobilityPLUS service, will resume as of today, as a tentative agreement between the GRT drivers and the Region has been reached. "To show our appreciation for our customers, no fares will be collected on transit from Thursday, May 11, up to and including May 22, Victoria Day," says an announcement on the Region of Waterloo website. "This includes all bus services as well as ION light rail service. Customers who purchased a May monthly pass before May 8 will receive a June pass."

After a brief hiatus, Procurement & Contract Services will resume hosting its annual trade show on Tuesday, May 16 and Wednesday, May 17 in the DC 1301 Fishbowl. The trade show showcases the resources available to the University through P&CS's suppliers. 

"Tuesday, May 16 is Technology Day with Dell Canada, Canada Computers, and many more suppliers," says the note from P&CS. "Staples Advantage will be back by popular demand on Wednesday, May 17, supported by a number of their select suppliers."

The trade show will take place between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday.