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From: BillW@Sri-Kl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Micros for universities.
Message-ID: <232@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 23-Mar-84 09:00:00 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.232
Posted: Fri Mar 23 09:00:00 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 26-Mar-84 21:12:17 EST
Lines: 50

From:  William "Chops" Westfield <BillW@Sri-Kl.ARPA>

I wasnt going to get into this argument, but I give up.  Here goes:

1) What is "State of the Art"
   "SotA" does NOT mean 'current exciting topics in computer research'
   In this case, the "art" is PERSONAL computers, and "SotA" is definately
   8086/68000/16032 architectures.  You can get rid of the 16032 if you
   make the art "low cost/student affordable personal computers", and
   the only reason the 68K is still there is becasue of MacIntosh.

2) Remember that there are universitys out there whose current
   "computing environment" is horendous.  My freshman programming
   course (fortran) was done on cards (the "honors" class I took
   (PL/1) got to use terminals!).  That was in 77.  Things are
   a little better at U of Penn now.  Note that this is a relatively
   large, expensive, Ivy league school.  I hate to think where
   smaller shools might be.  (not every place is a Stanford or
   berkeley that gets nice fat discounts because Computer manufacturers
   tend to get nice things back from them...)

3) Computerizing the university does not just mean giving personal
   computers to computer science or even engineering students/faculty!
   I know Stanford gave a bunch of IBM PCs to HUMANITIES type people,
   and Penn has Apollo workstations for linguistics, and there are
   all these poor economics and other business people whose idea of
   a computer course is "how to use the linear regression package".
   None of these CARE whether their microprocessor chip is elegant or
   not.  They only see the final applications.  This is really the
   kind of person MacIntosh was designed for;  the CS people will
   get them first so that they can write the linear regression package,
   the Mac(intosh)symna (hmm.),  the circuit simulators, and so on.
   And my god!  Think of all those people who still lug typewriters
   to school with them...

We all live in an ivory and silicon tower.  We know and understand and
like computers.  We dont have to worry about running up to many charges,
and not being able to finish our final assignments (at least to the point
of spending all this time sending silly messages back and forth!).  We
think the joys of using a computer are related to networking and graphics
and parallel processors and RISC and GaAs - We forget the simple joy
of having to type ONLY the corrections to the latest term paper.  Many
places, giving the students ANY kind of personal computer power will
GREATLY improve the situation (eg: Syracuse used to give ALL students
time on a DEC10, to use as they wished...  This much "Personal" computing
power wasnt available at Penn until several years later, and then only
to engineering students, and other places probably NOTHING exists...)

Sigh.
BillW