Some things about the college experience seem to prevail for decades: The ridiculous freshman-year dorm stories, the crazy roommates, the mediocre dining hall food and, of course, the drin … er, socializing. But one aspect of university life becomes more vital and integral to students as each year passes: computing.

In a typical day, a student might use the Wi-Fi on a laptop, check email on a smartphone and log in countless times to computer labs and course websites. But behind the monotonous login screen is a huge operation of employees and physical infrastructure we take for granted.

“People don’t realize how much of campus CITES actually runs with regards to technology,” said Joe Yun, manager of campus IT relations. “You think CITES, you think HelpDesk.”

But CITES handles thousands of wireless connections, many devices and the WebStore and connects the campus to the world. Joe Zalabak, assistant director of Engineering IT Shared Services, agrees.

“As you can imagine, it’s not as easy as maintaining a home computer. It’s constantly changing,” he said. “There are all of these different variants of different software.”

All of this results in an enormous effort to maintain. It’s not easy.

“Just that one screen that says NetID and password, there is so much equipment, so many programmers behind it,” Yun said. “That’s probably a multimillion-dollar ordeal.”

Here Technograph takes a look at what goes on behind the scenes of campus computing.

Wireless Internet is becoming more popular on campus than wired connections — beginning in the past couple of years more unique devices are using wireless connections than wired ones.

In October 2012 about 150,000 devices (mac addresses) were on wireless, compared with about 100,000 on wired (from graph).

If you look at a year ago, there was a peak around 16,000 users on wireless at any one time. Now we peak around 22,000 users.