Man, can you believe it's really been over seven years since Yalegate? That's, like, over half a century to a dog, so if you don't remember, you shouldn't feel bad (provided you have fur, a waggy tail, and an irrepressible urge to chase after sticks thrown by primates). Here's the quick recap: back in June of 1997, the director of Yale's Information Technology Services group, one Daniel Updegrove, sent a letter to the university's class of incoming freshmen strongly urging them to buy Wintel computers instead of Macs, since Yale "couldn't guarantee Mac support past the year 2000." That letter naturally unleashed some serious backlash from Yale's Mac-using community, and the calls for Updegrove's head on a platter grew louder still when it came to light that he'd very quietly applied for a $2.7 million "migration grant" from Intel in the very same month that he'd told the freshmen to buy Wintels instead of Macs. Suspicious, no?

The hubbub eventually died down without Updegrove getting canned or lynched for his apparent ethical shenanigans, although he did finally leave Yale in 2001 for the far more Wintel-friendly climes of the University of Texas at Austin (which is, of course, Dell country through and through). Interestingly, he claims to "participate on higher education advisory committees" for Dell, Microsoft... and Apple. Hmmmm. Well, in any case, it's his anti-Mac stance while at Yale that we're talking about right now; specifically, we're wondering just how much of a lasting effect his FUD-caked little notes to incoming students may have had.

Well, we can't say how far to the Wintel side ol' Dan managed to tip the scales before he left (he did get that Intel grant, incidentally), but seven years after his anti-Mac campaign began, the Yale Daily News is reporting that "Apple has made a much larger comeback in Yale student and faculty computing than its 10 to 12 percent national market share would indicate." "10 to 12 percent" nationwide? Where the heck did that come from? Here's hoping that not all of the article's numbers are overinflated, because it cites Yale ITS registration records as showing that "nearly 20 percent of University students and 33 percent of faculty choose Macs over Windows PCs."

Yowza! One Yale student in every five is a Mac user? One faculty member in every three is, too? Now those are some fractions we can get behind-- none of this "1 in 50" stuff we keep hearing every time the quarterly retail sales figures come out. Indeed, we won't be surprised if those ratios wind up swinging even further to the Mac side with the advent of the Mac mini. We're not sure how Yale's numbers compare to the rest of academia (anecdotal evidence implies that higher ed institutions in general seem to be going quite Mac-happy), but in any case, Dan Updegrove's original attempt to de-Mac-ify Yale seems to have failed pretty miserably in the long run. Not that he much cares, we bet, since his efforts apparently served his purposes just fine while he was there. But hey, it's good news for the rest of us, right?