CASPER was a project that started in 1992 in the Department of Computer Science at Wayne State University. The goal was to create a central computerised information resource for the students that would contain all of the important information the students would need, and allow the students to cross-reference that information.
The students would be able to see information about the courses offered by the department, about faculty members, and credit transfers. This information would be linked together so that the student could browse from the description of a course, to the faculty member who will be teaching that course in the next term, to hearing that faculty member introduce themselves through a short video. The students would also be able to use this information to plan their future terms selecting the courses they want / need to take based on the information available in the system. This allows the students to get information when the councelor was busy or the department office was closed
These days this would be a natural for a web-based solution, but back in 1992 with home pages in their infancy, there was no really good way to serve video conveniently across the internet, or use the web to put a very friendly graphical front end onto an Oracle database. So the system was implemented using Oracle as the database, hypercard as the interface, and a Macintosh IIci as the underlying hardware.
(unlike most of my work, I was not responsible for the CASPER acronym)
Copyright © Andrew Johnson 1996-2024