wrs@cmu-cs-k.ARPA (Walter Smith) (12/12/84)
A few fgrep/wc's on CMU's host table indicate a DEC-2060, a DEC-1080, a DEC-1050, 58 VAXen (23 750's, 29 780's, 4 784's, 2 725's), 48 SUNs, 10 Symbolics 3600's, 19 Altos, and a few Perqs, IBM-PC's, and MC68000 systems in the CS and EE departments, Robotics Institute, and Information Technology Center. Almost all of the CS/RI VAXen run 4.1BSD; EE runs 4.2BSD. There are about 150 Perqs around that aren't in the host table. All of these machines are for research, except for five VAXen which are used for teaching and general school use. There are other VAXen in other departments; I have no idea how many there are. Undergraduates (like me) can get accounts on the research machines only by being hired to do part-time programming for CS/RI/ITC. Once someone is hired, accounts are available on just about any machine one has need to be on; all that is necessary is the signature of his/her supervisor. The VAXen are very slow during the afternoon, but there are usually plenty of cycles late at night. The Computation Center has one DEC-2060 for administration and five DEC-2060's for teaching and random student use. Every student is entitled to a small account ($50/semester at $1.60/cpu-minute; discounts during non-prime time) for word processing, mail, or whatever, on one of these five machines. Many courses come with additional allocations on the 2060's, depending on how much they expect the students to use the machine for the course. For instance, Fundamental Structures of Computer Science II has a $600 cpu allocation, while Materials Science has about a $10 allocation. Most English courses come with a small allocation with which to write reports, term papers, and so forth. The CC also maintains a lot of IBM-PC's and Macintoshes in terminal rooms all over campus. Huge amounts of PC software (e.g. Epsilon (pseudo-Emacs), Scribble (pseudo-Scribe), Lotus 123, Kermit, Fortran, Pascal, ...) can be borrowed in the terminal rooms by leaving one's student ID at the desk. They are trying to move things like word processing off the overloaded 2060's by encouraging people to use the PC's instead. 2060 users are, to my knowledge, not allowed to hack randomly with the system software. The source may be available; I haven't looked for it. Of course, you can do whatever you want to a PC. The ITC is working on the hyped personal workstations; they were planning to have thousands (literally) of them installed by 1987 or thereabouts, but there seems to be some problem with getting the hardware cheaply enough. Other CMU people should, of course, feel free to clarify or correct this information. -- uucp: ...!seismo!cmu-cs-k!wrs arpa: wrs@cmu-cs-k.ARPA usps: Box 874; 5115 Margaret Morrison St.; Pittsburgh, PA 15213