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From: markg@nvuxf.UUCP (M. Guzdial)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: re: AT&T 6300 at UVM
Message-ID: <109@nvuxf.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-May-85 18:18:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: nvuxf.109
Posted: Mon May 13 18:18:35 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 14-May-85 23:59:50 EDT
Organization: Bell Communications Research, Red Bank, NJ
Lines: 61

To Mr. Shapiro at Haverford and Mr. Chen at Princeton

Gentlemen:

I think that both of you, frankly, are being blinded by your abilities and
perhaps your own vanity.

Obviously, you are both excellent computer scientists working on complex
applications requiring a good deal of CPU horsepower.  That's great, but
most users DON'T have those sort of requirements, and burdening those users
who don't have these requirements with either not having a machine or
paying the bucks for one that comes up to your high standards is unfair.

I think that my background permits me to speak with some familiarity with
the requirements of undergrads in respect to computers.  I am a recent 
graduate (May '84) of Wayne State University in Detroit, MI,
with a B.S. in Computer Science.  I taught community education for three
years, and my last year at Wayne, I taught a class in Robotics ("Real-Time
Assembly Language Programming") curriculum at Macomb County Community
College and high-school-equivalency classes.

Mr. Shapiro mentions that he knows of some 10 members of his class of
some 250 could bury a 6300, and that he would expect even greater
numbers of demanding users at a larger university.  Surprisingly, I have
not found this to be true.  Wayne State University has 35,000 students, and
I found only a handful of undergrads who REQUIRED more CPU than even a
Commodore-64.  Sure, there are always the hackers and the ones who want
ever-faster-response, but these are just the folks who'll be designing, 
building, and programming the next Suns and Crays.

Both of you mention your intense demands for "simulation, compiler 
hacking" and artificial intelligence applications.  Great, but very
few undergrads are going to have such demands, let alone fit in all
of those classes in an undergrad curriculum.  At Wayne, CS in under the
school of Liberal Arts, and between CS core classes and liberal arts
core classes, I had few electives left over for the "fun" CS courses.
I'm returning to grad school in the Fall and plan on taxing resources
of the CPU then, but I had little need to do so working for my BS.

Further, in a single semester, in any of these classes, how much CPU are
you really going to need?  In one semester, I really can't imagine an
undergrad building a compiler to tax the CPU of even a 6300, unless it's
an inefficient hog.  I wrote a simple compiler for an even less-powerful
CPU, a 6502-based "box," and I found that writing my own parser and code
generator for that, and making it run well, easily kept me busy for a
semester.  Why can't Lisp be run on such a machine?  Patrick
Winston, co-author of "Lisp," seems to think that Golden Common Lisp on
a PC is reasonable, according to his article in last month's Byte.
Sure, if you're planning on doing massive Prolog-like
resolutions you'll run the 6300 into the ground, but you'd do that to
any processor short of a super-mini or a mainframe.

Most importantly, though, is that by insisting on the 6300, representing 
any decent, expandable microcomputer, UVM is making sure that all students
have the advantages of having access to such a machine for their own use,
and that faculty may develop computer-based-curricula knowing that what
they develop may be used by the entire student base.  Going with several
different machines ruins the latter, and not forcing the purchase eliminates
both since, certainly, the non-CS-types won't buy the machine if they don't
have-to.  They have to be educated to realize that such a machine can be
useful to them.