Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!vaxine!wjh12!genrad!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!ron@Brl-Tgr.ARPA From: ron@Brl-Tgr.ARPA Newsgroups: net.micro Subject: Re: Micros for universities. Message-ID: <410@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Tue, 27-Mar-84 16:32:32 EST Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.410 Posted: Tue Mar 27 16:32:32 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 4-Apr-84 03:21:58 EST Lines: 42 From: Ron Natalie C'mon, let's be realistic with your cost analysis (although I feel that some universities are not). Even if you buy (or are given) a hundred micros someone does end up supporting them if things are going to work. In addition you are going to have to deal with the shopping cart full of floppy problem of data transfer or you will need some kind of networking strategy. Balancing it all out it would seem much more convenient not to use the cheapest computers possible. While, I think it is a good point to have students have their own personal computers for scratch homework computations, text processing, and maybe a little computer literacy of their own, I don't feel that this takes the place of having (excuse me) a real computer for these students to learn on. I am currently planning on micro systems for my brother and sister to take with them to college. One is entering law school and needs word processing more than anything else, and the other is starting undergraduate liberal arts studies and would need a more diverse mixture. The exposure, when you are using your little personal machine is minimal. There is no interaction with the academic community. What is there to be learned, other than being an expert on the particular MICRO that you happen to have purchased? A group of supported micros networked is better, but I really don't think the technology is that far along. The software base on a midsized (VAX) academic computer is typically more diverse than a micro can afford to support. Our machine, for instance, had LISP, APL, FORTRAN, PASCAL, and C languages, all different, all important, and all necessary for their particular applications. We have software from many inexpensive sources that gives a diversity which a single user just couldn't assemble on his own. My initial statement (about library style computing) was a comment that universities are tending to cut off the free computer access to students that many used to have. This is partly because university administrations are now jealously considering computer time as a university resource to be charged for, etc...when just the opposite should be true. The access should be increasing because of the declining price of the technology. Now that they have seen that computers are a good thing, and not some academic toy, they are getting very stingy. -Ron