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From: paul@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Paul Lansky)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT concerns
Summary: view of optical disk usage
Message-ID: <5839@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 27 Jan 89 01:38:35 GMT
References: <4474@umd5.umd.edu> <32681@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 48

In article <32681@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, jgreely@diplodocus.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) writes:
> In article <4474@umd5.umd.edu> feldman@umd5.umd.edu (Mark Feldman) writes:
> >        The university computing model requires that users be able to access
> >	and share data easily throughout the campus.  When someone is forced
> >	to remove their data (optical drive) when they leave a NeXT, they
> >	are being forced to isolate their data.  An optical floppy at home,
> >	left in a backpack or car, or anywhere that there isn't a NeXT is
> >	useless.
> 
> My opinion on the use of optical discs for user files is that it's a
> warm-fuzzy sort of thing.  We'd never be comfortable with it here, and
> would give students home directories mounted from a generic NFS server.
> The real use for the opticals is so that users can transport their own
> material in a more useful form than magtape.  The option to use opticals
> for non-critical files would take the drain off of the fileserver ("If
> you *really* want a private copy of nethack, keep it on your own disc,
> kid").

I think it is a seriously short-sighted mistake to simply regard
the optical disks as student storage, or portable personal directories,
for 'non-critical files', detritus, games, and love letters.
It probably does make sense to store most student files on a server.
The real beauty of the optical disks is the way in which they enable lots of 
problems and tasks to be contemplated which were previously dismissed
because of the amount of storage they would consume.  In processing
digital signals, for example, a 75 megabyte file is not particularly large,
but I would bet that in most traditional hard-disk academic environments
administrators would shrink with horror at the thought of a student 
occupying 200 megabytes of their online storage.  It would be utterly
out of the question for a professor to contemplate a course with 20
students, each of whom would need 250 megabytes of disk storage.  
The issue is that the ways of thinking about disk storage and computing
task have become petrified because of the hard constraints on these resources.
Now that this storage is available lots of signal processing and
graphical applications, for example, which need large 
amounts of disk storage can start to filter down to the student level,
whereas previously they were mainly the purview of researchers, professors
and graduate students.  The marriage of this capability with a machine
which is capable of signal and image processing is a brilliant stroke. 

The possiblility of almost infinite, inexpensive, disk storage, perhaps
a bit slow for a year or two, creates a really new dimension in computing,
educational computing in particular.  Whether you run the system from an
internal hard disk, from a server (I suspect the best way is NOT from an
optical disk), or whatever, is a problem that doesn't seem all that
difficult to solve.  But any administrators who can't see the fact that
this configuration opens a new door, are short-changing their constituents 
and ought to go back to school themselves.