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People interested in computer art and desktop publishing will be
pleased with the opening of the
School of Visual Arts Computer Lab last semester. The new lab is
located in the Art Building, room 231. They cater primarily to
Macintosh users who are interested in computer graphics and design.
The lab was originally opened on a trial basis in Spring 1994 but
was available to computer art students only. In Fall 1994, the lab
became a General Access Computer Lab. This means that anyone with a
valid student ID can use the lab.
This semester the lab will have 14 Macintosh computers. Five of them
are 7100 Power Macs and two are Quadra 650 s. All seven are equipped
with 17" monitors. The minimum amount of RAM in these computers will
be 16 megabytes while most will have 20 megabytes or more installed. A
scratch drive will be created so that students will temporarily have
access to up to 2 gigabytes of disk space.
Each computer is hooked up to a CD-ROM drive and a Syquest SCSI
drive that allows you to buy and use your own hard drive on their
computers. This spring the lab will be replacing some of the current
5.25" 44 megabyte Syquest drives with 5.25" 200 megabyte Syquest
drives. All the new drives will be compatible with the 44 amd 88
megabyte disks.
There are also three flatbed color scanners available. They are
hooked up to Macintosh computers with Ofoto scanner software
installed. In addition to the Macintosh computers, the lab
currently has one Pentium based PC computer available for general use.
This is expected to grow by at least two more in the Spring.
The applications that are supported in the lab all cater to
computer art. Adobe Photoshop is installed for standard computer image
manipulation and support. Macromind Director is available for computer
animation. For desktop publishing, Aldus Pagemaker, Quark Express,
Adobe Illustrator, and Aldus Freehand are installed among many others.
The lab follows most of the policies that the other General Access
Labs follow. An exception is in the time limit, you are allowed two
hours on a computer as opposed to the standard one when there is a
wait.
The Computer Art Lab is currently being connected to the campus wide
Ethernet backbone. This means that full access to both the Internet
and the Novell servers will be available. The process should be done
early in the Spring semester. The Art Department also has set up a
departmental file server (ART) that will free up more space on the
computers for students to use.
If you have time this semester, stop by the new lab and try your
hand at the exploding field of computer graphics and animation.
Mon.-Fri.: 9 am-11 pm Saturday: 9 am-5 pm Sunday: Noon-10 pm
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