Our Lab...

Our lab is officially called the "Human-Computer Interaction and Software Development Laboratory", but nobody ever calls it that. It is usually referred to as the HCI lab (and not the IHC lab as a fellow comrade keeps referring to it as!).

The lab is situated in G1.32 (i.e. G block, 1st floor, Room 32), and was filled with X terminals until the end of 1994 (the lab was mainly used for communications and graphics type stuff at this time). At this stage the lab had a yellow lino on the floor, some ugly brown boring desks, and some grey coloured chairs. At the beginning of 1995, four Power Macintosh machines (Granny Smith, Coxs Orange, Pippin, Braeburn) arrived, so out went the X terminals and in with the Macs. Of course, our Apple Macintosh machines had to have names of Apples. The lab then got its glorious title. It wasn't long before some supposedly anti-static carpet was put in the room to replace the lino, and we all started getting shocks. Another machine finally turned up (Jona Gold), and then we got some nice new grey/white desks, fancy purple swivel chairs, purple lounge chairs, and blue dividers so we could make cubicles. For a while the old desks were piled up in our room making it difficult to move around. We then got the printer from G1.31 moved into our lab (an HP LaserJet 4m Plus). Bookshelves, a Whiteboard, and a Notice board came next. The Whiteboard has been used many a time to create a real atmosphere in the lab. We've had things on it ranging from ridiculous pictures (such as a Huntly power-station birthday cake) to stupid quotes about nothing in particular. About a year after having the _old_ Power Macs we got some new ones (8500/120) and new monitors too (with decent stereo speakers on each). Each machine was then upgraded to 32Mb RAM. Along the way, Rodger quite successfully killed a couple of monitors by singing to them, so we've had a couple of extra monitors too.

If you want to contact us, you can phone us on 838-4466 ext. 6729, or just pop in and see us in G1.32.

Pictures coming soon....