Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!tness7!texbell!bigtex!milano!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!encore!bzs@xenna From: bzs@xenna (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: The NeXT machine has been announced! (long) Message-ID: <3956@encore.UUCP> Date: 22 Oct 88 22:08:22 GMT References: <360@elan.UUCP> <449@oracle.UUCP> <4005@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <458@oracle.UUCP> Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu Reply-To: bzs@xenna (Barry Shein) Organization: Encore Computer Corp Lines: 42 In-reply-to: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) >A removable optical disk is the wrong medium for student lab use. If >you've got file servers, you want the software to be stored there. If >there's any removable medium at all, you want it to be something cheap >like a floppy, for a student to put his own files on. Unless they >provide some way to lock a given optical disk in the machine >permanently, we sure can't put a system like that out in public. Macintosh floppies typically have system folders on them, why not a basic unix dist on each user's optical disk (which can then go NFS mount a server directory for more software)? At least enough to boot up and get going with. The university basically doesn't own any of the optical disks that are going into the machines. The optical disks are $50 for 256MB, even with a pretty hefty Unix distribution (and swap/page) on them there's probably over 150MB for a student's files. I don't think $50 is expensive for 150MB of personal storage, in fact, compared with floppies it's downright cheap, I'd be surprised if many students could use that much in their entire undergrad career (how much disk do you give undergrads right now?) I could imagine the optical disks being sold pre-formatted with Unix on them, why not (how else?) So you walk up to a machine, plug it in, boot and go to work. I don't understand the objection, other than perhaps a feeling that a student walking around with an entire Unix binary distribution in his/her pocket seems wrong, why? The only possible objection I can see is that student's software will become outdated. Big deal, mac user's run into that all the time. In the first place, it's not necessarily a bad thing (ie. their applications they may have paid for/built will work with *their* version of the system) and besides, the optical disk could be updated, probably by buying a new one for $50 and transfering all the user files to it (probably more reliable than trying to update the user's disk in place), the old disk becomes a backup, an extra, or even gets traded in for credit on the new one and is recycled. How often would it be an issue? Once a year I would guess, $50 every September with no particular rush to update to it in most cases. -Barry Shein, ||Encore||