Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!elroy!cit-vax!mangler
From: mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Don Speck)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS!
Message-ID: <5758@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 14 Mar 88 06:52:27 GMT
References: <1636@tulum.UUCP>
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 29
Summary: purpose of computing centers

In article <1636@tulum.UUCP> hirai@swatsun.uucp (Eiji "A.G." Hirai) writes:
> This person [in charge of computing services] has in mind buying Vaxes
> with VMS, and DECnet with lots of money...

In 1979, Caltech's computing center replaced its DECsystem-10 with a
pair of Vaxes.	All the users were horrified at the cost of CPU time,
so one by one the departments bought vaxen of their own, and by 1986
none of the departments needed the computing center.  The computing
center's vaxes were sold, the operators fired, and they were out of
business.

Do you think it even mattered whether they ran VMS or Unix?  (They ran a
Unix emulator on top of VMS).  They went out of business not because of
their software, but because most departments could afford the same kind
of machines and run them to suit their own priorities.	What they were
running did not benefit from being centralized.

Computing centers came about in the days when no virtually no department
could justify any useful-sized computer on their own.  The closest modern
analog is the supercomputer.

A computer center should concern itself with providing services which
benefit from being centralized because they're expensive or require
trained and/or round-the-clock personnel.  Things like supercomputers,
your campus LAN backbone, network gateways, mail servers, news servers,
disk servers, backup servers, phototypesetters, color laser printers,
obtaining campus-wide licenses and maintaining sources archives.
Things that you tend to want very few of, rather than many.

Don Speck   speck@vlsi.caltech.edu  {amdahl,ames!elroy}!cit-vax!speck