[PLUG] Article in Linux Today about M$ kill UNIX at Universities..

[Dennis W. Brylow]

Quoting A Braunsdorf (ab@eas.purdue.edu):
> ...
> PUCC!
> 
> It may be hard to fathom in these days when they're considered a
> Great Satan, but PUCC used to be one of the top training grounds
> for computer people.  I know- I was there.
> ...

   One of the main reasons CS180 switched to its current configuration was
to disentangle ourselves from the ENAD labs and what PUCC had become.
   Anyone who took or taught the course prior to Fall '98 remembers the
mob scenes in ENAD as hundreds of CS180 students competed desperately with
hundreds of students from other courses to get machine time.  Meanwhile,
enrollment in CS180 was steadily increasing.
   On top of that, PUCC was becoming less and less responsive to our problems,
and the number of downed machines in the labs was not getting smaller.
   The staff of CS180 -- both graduate and undergraduate TA's -- wanted
very much to stay on a Unix platform.  But it was an unavoidable fact that 
the labs needed to be moved somewhere (anywhere) else.
   There wasn't anywhere else on this campus.  The CS department itself can
only offer a handful of public workstations at a time.

   Along came Micro$oft, willing to give us all the software for a new lab,
(hand in hand with a hefty hardware donation, complete with snazzy flatscreens)
and, far more importantly, willing to give out the development environment
for free to all students enrolled in the course.  There would be no need
to try to come up with a hundred new work stations -- most of the students
could work on their own PC's.  And we all know what operating system the
vast majority of those PC's would be running.
   It wasn't the best solution.  It was the *only* solution to our crushing
lack of sufficient lab space.

   That's the story of why CS180 is no longer taught on Sparc/Solaris
workstations.

	Dennis Brylow
	Former Course Coordinator, CS180.