horton@harvard.ARPA (Nike Horton) (12/13/84)
Computers at Harvard seem to follow the city-state philosophy that the
rest of the university follows. As a result, each system, with few
exceptions, is managed independently from all the rest, and no one
person ever knows what is going on.
To try to combat this "decentralization", the various levels of
administration commissioned a group of bureaucrats at the Office for
Information Technology to put together a "University Computer
Directory". The last version of this (published in 1983, and bound
with a neat graphic on the front), totalled 210 pages in all.
Unfortunately, these were not all Suns, Vaxen, or PDP's, as PC's of all
shapes and sizes were included. It does, however, serve as a reference
for more obscure departments.
The main educational computing is provided by the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences (hereafter referred to as FAS). This group runs 1 11/785,
3 11/780's, 2 11/750's, 2 11/70's and a PRIME. UNIX 4.2/2.9 runs on
roughly half of the machines, while the rest sport VMS. These provide
the main computing for all of the low-level and mid-level CS courses,
and most of the upper-level ones. A number of social science courses
and other non-traditional uses for computers in education are handled
here as well.
There has recently been a move towards offloading courses onto Macintoshes,
since Harvard is a member of the Consortium. This has proven to be
mildly successful in the first test - handling the intro Pascal course with
roughly 250 students.
As previously mentioned in one of marie@harvard's articles, all
undergraduates and a limited subset of non-CS graduate students are
provided free accounts on the UNIX machines. These are gifted with
unlimited CPU, but are restricted to 10 blocks of disk and are only
allowed on when there are less than a certain percentage of ports
being used. There are also automatically niced down 2 notches, and
are scorned by the system staff. These "low-priority" accounts, as
they are called, are good for playing games and sending mail (and
reading news). The hackers are left out in the cold.
Back in the good old days :-) there weren't many of the hackers, so
anyone who want to play or tinker was hired by the very limited staff.
However, with the growth of the past few years things have changed
enormously, and there are more people interested in playing around.
The charter of the FAS computers is to aid in teaching, not for
general computing. So they are forced to go elsewhere.
Fortunately, there are a large number of elsewheres.
One long-time haven for the late-night hackers has been the Psychology &
Social Relations and the Sociology Department. Both departments are
housed in the same building, and share an 11/750 and an aging 11/44
which has run as Harvard's connection to the outside for ages (wjh12).
These machines are run by a long-time Harvard person, who is basically
the only person in the area doing creative systems work. Some of his
current projects include a university wide Mail name server and a
Unified Source Package for BSD machines. Many people drift in and out
of CBL during their years here, as it is a very relaxed, very
congenial atmosphere. Unfortunately, in recent years the Psych and
Sociology departments have made more and more of a demand on the
machines, so there is less freedom to experiment and tinker.
Another great elsewhere is the Division of Applied Sciences (DAS, not
to be confused with FAS). The Division - a separately endowed and
separately run entity - houses the Engineering Sciences along with
Computer Science and Chemistry, to name a few. The main facilities
there include an aging DEC-10 which is soon to disappear, an 11/780,
an 8-node Apollo network, 6 Sun workstations, a Ridge 32C, and a
variety of little 68000 boxes running shades of UNIX. These
facilities are technically strictly for graduate student and faculty
research, but in reality most systems research is done by
undergraduates. The main barrier to getting an account is finding a
faculty member to work with, but this is not hard for sophomores and
juniors.
People have been bemoaning the fact that there is no machine that real
development can be done on. All the machines mentioned above - while
not administrative in nature - are relied on by a sufficient number of
people to rule out any possibility of taking them down on a full day basis.
Other sites of interest include machines located in the Math
Department, Chemistry Department, Biology Department and the Law
School. All of these, again meant for researchers, hide a small
number of undergraduate hackers.
The basic problem for people wanting to play is finding the location
to do so, and justifying the free resources by doing some work. The
labyrinthine nature of Harvard, however, makes this difficult.
The current dean of FAS is really into computing, and under his lead
there seems to be more of a centralization of decision-making accompanied by
a influx of money. This has so far culminated in the rapid expansion of
a Sytek LAN, which is to be the terminal part of a broadband network.
They plan to hook up all dorms and major buildings in the next few years,
and continue to link up the growing number of mini's, workstations, and
micros which are appearing on the scene. This is being used in conjunction
with ethernet as a method of linking hosts together.
--
Nicholas Horton Aiken Computation Lab
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