Issue link: http://latinschool.uberflip.com/i/246730
"Starting in middle school, I did a lot of computer-geek projects for Latin. I worked after school and over the summers for the school, and one of the big things we did was upgrading and setting up new computers. Every year, our budget depended quite a bit on how much Finders Keepers could give us; once we knew, we would sit down with the Apple price list and figure out what we could afford for the year – we'd decide, okay, we can buy this computer and swap this part out or rebuild that machine. The entire technology budget was never more than $40,000. It was wonderful problem-solving on a shoestring. "Probably around 1990 or '91, we started to network the computers around the school. It was all very experimental. There would be these little clusters of faculty or staff who could send messages to each other. Then we worked on figuring out how to connect the closet-size faculty offices on the third floor and then eventually the lower school. We taught ourselves to use the phone wires that had been part of the old phone system and were running through the school. We would go down into the bowels of the school – the Top. Ben Horwich '95 during his senior year; bottom, basements, sub-basements, the boiler room, janitorial Ben in the 1994 yearbook doing what he loved best. closets – looking for wires to connect. To connect to the lower school, we positioned wireless transmitters in the windows on the top floors of the buildings. A lot of our work happened during the summers or in the evenings when the school was empty, and it was a great experience to revisit places I had grown up in, like Janet Underhill's music room or the lower school library. I remember how amazing it was to go back as an upper school student and take the old lower school elevator – which for us as children was the holiest of holies that no student was ever allowed to go in. "The year I graduated was the year that the major remodeling work on the school started. At the time, the computer budget was being rewritten. We were agape when we found out the school was going to do this big project and it was going to cost $150,000 for rewiring alone. Obviously, it was the end of an era." – Ben Horwich '95. LATI N SCHOOL OF CHI CA GO 109