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

[Josh Guffin]

On Tue, 21 Sep 1999, Dennis W. Brylow wrote:

> 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.

So is there a restriction on OS use?  Why not just throw Open or
FreeBSD on there?  I don't think it's to much for CS majors to learn
the very basics of vi, pico, or emacs.  Makefiles shouldn't take up to
much lecture time.  Wow, you're learning Real Programming.

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= Josh Guffin                                     guffin@purdue.edu =
= Purdue U. HEP - TASK E               expert.cc.purdue.edu/~guffin =
= finger jguffin@physics.purdue.edu        #include<std/disclaimer> =
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