Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!rochester!quiroz
From: quiroz@cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: X-terms v. PCs v. Workstations
Message-ID: <1989Nov29.031045.14612@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 29 Nov 89 03:10:45 GMT
References: <1128@m3.mfci.UUCP> <1989Nov22.175128.24910@ico.isc.com> <3893@scolex.sco.COM> <39361@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <17305@netnews.upenn.edu> <1989Nov25.000120.18261@world.std.com> <1989Nov27.144016.23181@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <1989Nov27.213238.24130@cs.rochest
Reply-To: quiroz@cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz)
Organization: University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science
Lines: 64

In <1989Nov28.204639.11237@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>, jonah@db.toronto.edu (Jeffrey Lee) wrote:
| quiroz@cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz) writes:
| 
| >    THE PROBLEM IS NOT TECHNOLOGICAL.
| 
| Part of it is, part of it isn't.

Quite true.  I should have said the problem is not JUST
technological, but that it has a substantial political component.

Thanks for the description of your environment, I think it is indeed
quite unusual to have side by side the two approaches.  But
certainly both styles you describe have a blend of centralization
and distribution: what changes is what gets distributed.  I must
confess that the idea of centralization that I had in mind coincides
with the way the other service (the one your people mostly ignore)
most likely works.

Here we have (mainly) a bunch of SPARCstations with Sun3 and Sun4
servers.  I wouldn't call it a extremely distributed environment: we
are still vulnerable to double-point failures.  But we have the
convenience that all our personal/project files are accessible
(essentially) from any of the machines.  And everybody has an
account good for every machine.  No quotas, except for the social
pressure not to waste disks that you share (and people will complain
if you begin taking all the available cycles).  No funny-money
billing from a computer center--you use the resources you need, you
never run out of cpu or printing capacity just because you ran out
of funny money.  

We have a very competent (if slightly overworked and occasionally
abused) staff that keeps the place together and working; and the
most experienced users have traditionally taken to themselves to
help the newcomers or more casual users, so there is no visible
shortage of wizardry when that is needed.  I would say that it has
less centralized authority than the ones you described, including
the one you called decentralized (and, I must say, I find ours a
most productive environment precisely because of the absence of
interminable chains of permission and limitation).

Also, I think we are happier now with the SPARCs and their local
disks than with the never-lamented 3/50s (I always considered insane
to page over the network, and doubly so to have machines that HAD to
page all the time).  The balance of work is much better these days:
the workstation I and my 2 officemates share is powerful enough to
do a lot of work by itself, without bothering the fileservers or the
network.  These tweaks are technology, the actual driving spirit is
political:  the will to share the resources without too much
bureaucracy.

Anyway, that was a long digression.  My point is this:  your
experience shows that, of the two degrees of centralization that you
have tried, the one you call `centralized' worked for you better
than the other.  From there to conclude with DiMarco et al. that
this experience is so generally valid that workstations are just a
fad, or that centralization wins always, there is a tremendous leap
of faith.

( Aren't we converging?  This could be a most unusual phenomenon :-)
-- 
                                      Cesar Augusto Quiroz Gonzalez
                                      Department of Computer Science
                                      University of Rochester
                                      Rochester,  NY 14627


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