TransformingSCsDestinyOnline - page 61

S C T E CHN I CA L CO L L E G E S Y S T EM ’ S
F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
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5 9
The 1980s
A D E S I G N F O R T E C H N O L O G I C A L C H A N G E
“Senator, I’m not going to fight you anywhere. No way.”
Lindsey said, “Good answer, boy. Good answer.”
A year rolled by. Zobel went before the Budget and Control
Board to make his annual budget presentation with Bill Dudley,
the system’s executive director.
“Before I started, Rembert Dennis stood up and said, ‘Gen-
tlemen, these folks helped us out last year. I want to help them
out. I want to propose a million and a half for their equipment
program. They need it badly.’”
“I hadn’t said a word to Dennis about that money. He re-
membered. And that’s the type of people we were dealing with
back then. Gentlemen. They looked out for themselves; but they
mostly looked out for the state of South Carolina.”
Getting that $1.5 million was like an act of providence.
Equipment was crucial for a system trying to modernize the
state’s economic base. Dr. Darrel Staat was an administrator at
Florence-Darlington Tech during the eighties and remembers
the urgency. “Key people from the system level on down knew
they had to keep up and if possible, stay ahead of the curve in the
business world. If the business world got computers, they had to
too. They couldn’t drag behind.”
Dr. JimMorris was president of Midlands Tech for the launch
of “Design for the Eighties.” He remembers those days when
money always seemed lacking. “I was an integral part of “De-
sign for the Eighties.” In fact, I led some groups to Pittsburgh to
the GE training facility, to the robotics lab at Carnegie Mellon,
and took a group to GE in Detroit and looked at their training
program. The intent was to get us current with technology. We
never had enough equipment money to stay current. We were
always lagging, which was troublesome.”
Getting the General Assembly to allocate funds to “Design
for the Eighties” fell into Ed Zobel’s camp. Working with and
influencing General Assembly members made for long days and
nights. It wasn’t always the best thing for a marriage. According
to Zobel, “If they got into a filibuster, you had to stay. It got to
where my wife thought I was having an affair.”
In those days, a local news station would broadcast its initial
seven o’clock news segment from the State House. When legisla-
tors stonewalled legislation ad infinitum, Zobel had a strategy. “I
would walk behind the guy giving the news so my wife could see
I was at the State House.”
That old philosophy “seeing is believing” helped Zobel in
more ways than one. He remembers one such attempt to show
off the system’s high-tech prowess.
“The system came up with ‘Design for the Eighties,’” said Zo-
bel. This concept let each of the sixteen colleges come up with an
idea as to what they could do best. Greenville Tech became the
site for the Advanced Machine Tool Resources Center. Midlands
Technical College became the Center for Advanced Office Oc-
cupations. Piedmont Tech chose robotics, and its team of techno
daredevils made a robot that could walk and talk.
Robotics was big in the 1980s, and robot mania swept the
country. During this time, the most famous robot of all assumed
human-like status: an autonomous cyborg, the Terminator, fa-
mously played by Arnold “I’ll be back” Schwarzenegger. Star
Wars droids R2-D2 and C-3PO, along with the personal com-
puter revolution, made the 1980s a prolific time for robotics.
Industries used robots to work in areas where heat and adverse
conditions proved harmful to humans, and the Dustbot—the
first robot with a built-in vacuum cleaner—cleaned house.
While sucking up dust and dirt, his elfin arms wielded a symbol-
ic broom and dustpan. This autonomous bot’s sensors let it know
when to turn—and when not to fall off a table.
Music hopped aboard the robotmania train as well. Early in
the 1980s Styx released a rock song, “Mr. Roboto.” It’s fanciful to
say the tech board commissioned it. Revise and reposition the
lyrics just so and a Styx command performance for the Gener-
al Assembly would have sent the right message: technology was
outracing the tech system.
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