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From: cem@intelca.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re:  Micros for universities.
Message-ID: <246@intelca.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 3-Apr-84 12:43:05 EST
Article-I.D.: intelca.246
Posted: Tue Apr  3 12:43:05 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Apr-84 00:47:40 EST
References: <410@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: Intel, Santa Clara, Ca.
Lines: 27

I agree with Ron on most parts of his message, especially about Universities
finding out that not only will students pay to use those non-prime time hours
but will out bid other students for accounts. When the university has a 30XX
that is bored stiff at 9:00 at night because it just finished expending 
.000000001 CPU seconds in figuring out the days accounting info, should be
given something to do. Also not a few of these students develop useful 
utilities that often become essential parts of the system. (This I believe
was the original motivation of Hackers, ie to emulate the gods, Systems
Programmers.) 

On the continuing flame of mainframes vs minis vs micros. Network technology
and microcomputers are becoming sufficiently advanced that you can run programs
through the network as though they were on your own disk, send mail to other
users and basically never know there was a network. Eventually someone will
write an executive that will make n micros on a 10Mbit network look like 1
virtual machine with n terminals. It will however be very fault tolerant and
should exhibit only marginal degredation as the number of users increases. 
Also on the network should be various "export" processors that are adept at
particular functions, like array processors, or extra high speed data
crunchers. Then there may be no way to tell if you are on a micro or mini.
Lets propose a standard of computing like the original standard for AI,
if when you use a micro you can't tell whether you are using a mainframe
micro, or mini. Then for all intents and purposes you are using a mainframe.
(highest common denominator)

				--Chuck