The computing era — the thin record, printed thin

THE DATED RECORD BEGINS IN THE SCHOOLS

What the record does not hold: South Bend's computing record begins with a photographed UNIVAC in about 1962, and this section looked for Mishawaka's equivalent: a first computer of record in the city government, a bank, the schools, the hospital, or one of the works. The record reached does not hold one. The city's commissioned history — which carries the first telephone wires of 1880 and the steam frontier of 1941 — contains no computer at all; the word does not appear in it. No installation date, machine name or data-processing department for any Mishawaka institution was found in the press, institutional or reference records reached for this section, and no claim is made here: not that Mishawaka computed late, only that its computing left no dated trace in the records. The settling sources are named for the update cycle — the Enterprise and Tribune runs of the 1950s–1970s, where a bank's or a works' first machine would have been news, and the records of the Mishawaka Public Utilities Company, whose billing was the city's likeliest first data-processing load. The engineering-computation record of the Dodge and Wheelabrator works, if it was ever written down, stands in the same gap; their files own what is documented of those firms, and neither carries a computer.

What the record does hold: The dated Mishawaka computing record that exists stands in the Schools section, and it is pointed to here at its size. The high school's science and technology wing of the fall of 1999 carried, in the Schools section's own account, a full industrial-technology suite — a manufacturing laboratory with hydraulics, pneumatics, CNC lathes and milling machines, and a computer-aided-design drafting laboratory — the first computer named as a place in this city's documented record: a laboratory, in a public high school, in 1999. In November 2016 the district's voters approved an operating referendum whose purposes the state's own later wording gives as "student and staff safety, academic programming, technology and personnel" — technology standing as a named, voter-approved purpose of the school city's funding, carried whole in the Schools section. Bethel University's computing belongs to the present tense at the size its own record gives it: the university carries a Center for Computing on Bethel Circle and computer-science and computer-and-information-sciences majors whose own department describes hands-on access to computing hardware as the program's emphasis from the first course — a functioning program, at closing strength, with no founding date claimed in the record reached.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — searched whole for this section: the word "computer" nowhere in the text; no installation of record for any Mishawaka institution.
2. The banked Schools section of this build — the fall 1999 science and technology wing's industrial-technology suite, including the CNC lathes and milling machines and the computer-aided-design drafting laboratory; the November 2016 operating referendum approved for purposes including technology, on the state's wording.
3. Bethel University, Mathematics & Computer Science Department and Center for Computing pages — the computer-science program's hands-on hardware emphasis from the first course; the Center for Computing at 1001 Bethel Circle, Mishawaka. No founding date in the record reached.