mss@DARTMOUTH.CSNET (01/26/86)
I'd just thought I'd let people know that we have been using an AppleTalk network for our systems design/data structures class. Students program with TML Pascal, a two disk system. The way we have arranged things, our Macintoshes live on the network with an XL/Serve disk server and a LaserWriter. Students use a "special" disk to boot the Macintosh, then connect to a shared (locked) class disk on the disk server that contains a system, finder, Pascal compiler, and other system software. They eject the special boot disk, option-double-click the finder on the class disk, and they are now running diskless using a system disk with about 1M of "useful" programs. The students' programs live on the students' private disks which are placed in the internal drive. Students can print MacWrite documents from the diskless system as well. However, to edit a MacWrite document, paint a MacPaint document or print an Edit document requires a disk that can be written to. Therefore we have 5 tiny private disks on the disk server containing Edit and MacPaint which students can "check out" for printing/editing and then return to the server when done. We assume that they have their own MacWrite disks for editing and do not need our system at all. We're living with three problems: 1) XL/Serve is slightly slower than Sony drivers (we're running with a large cache on XL/Serve and seem to be running nearly completely out of the Lisa cache); 2) It is inconvenient to boot/setup, especially when a program bombs or gets into an infinite loop (students now routinely call InitDialog with a procedure that exits to shell instead of forcing the reboot); 3) MacPaint does not like the LaserWriter or XL/Serve. If one tries to just "Print" from the finder, MacPaint does not use draft mode, which the LaserWriter wants; if one opens a MacPaint document, prints it, closes it, and opens another, MacPaint dies (bomb ID = 2). If anyone has a better way, we'd like to hear about it, but this is how we dealt with the problem of providing everyone a second disk drive, plenty of systems software and access to a LaserWriter.