Spreading a Lifelong Love of Learning with MIP

Disc Drive Beginnings

Since 1973, Humanities North
Dakota has offered opportunities
for lifelong learning through
affordable classes and events to North Dakota residents.

The courses cover history, philosophy, ethics, literature, languages, jurisprudence in law, comparative religion, archeology, and many more. They are presented in part through the organization’s collaboration with its partner agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Humanities ND also works with various nonprofit groups across the state, giving grants to support their efforts to promote the education of the humanities.

Since 1986, Ken Glass, Associate Director of Humanities ND, has been in the middle of it all, with MIP Fund Accounting^® at his side. Humanities ND switched to MIP in 1985 after an auditor recommended the organization replace its paper books that consisted of long ledgers and multiple columns.

It wasn’t until Glass arrived that Humanities ND dove into the program and began to optimize its finances for the digital age using the MS-DOS version of MIP, one of the first versions of the software.

“Back then, your computer had two disc drives. One for the
operating system, and one for whatever program you were
running,” Glass said. “We had to use these big floppy
discs to run the program.”

“Even from the beginning,
MIP worked for our needs.”

“It worked really well because we received large federal grants
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and those
grants are open for as long as five years. We needed a system
that could manage those grants.”