The following year Arthur Porter was appointed the Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan. He had worked under Douglas Hartree, a computer software pioneer, at the University Manchester in the 1930s and again during the Second World War in the Ministry of Supply.
Though Porter was at the U of S only for five years, he moved the U of S headlong into the computer age. He secured funding, set up a computer research group and raised the profile of the computer through the press and public lectures.