neil@sfucmpt (Neil Mackenzie) (07/29/83)
We are a Computing Science Dept of a Simon Fraser University(11000 students) located in Vancouver Canada. Our department is 7 years old, and growing rapidly. Most of our own computing equipment is used for research or upper levels computing courses.We depend on the universities COMPUTING CENTRE to provide the facilities for our lower level courses. Our introductory computing course has typically 700 students enrolled in it. The centre handles this course by providing a Widjet System(combined Editor and RJE system) and access to an IBM OS system. The bottom line is, we are no longer satisfied with the services our Computing Centre(not unusual in Universities) provides for our students. We are now looking into running our own show. We are currently gathering information on any hardware and software used by other CMPT SCIENCE DEPT to teach introductory computing courses. The faculty member in charge of our lower level courses put together the following questionaire and mailed it out to a number of universities thru out Canada and the U.S. 1. Please name or describe the hardware, operating system, and any special software you are using. Is the hardware locked into using only one type of operating system? 2. What was the approximate cost of this system excluding the cost of the terminals? 3. Are you satisfied with this system? Please describe your frustrations and complaints if any. 4. Which programming languages can be taught on this system; can programs be executed in both batch and interactive modes? 5. How many concurrent signons does your system allow? Does performance (response time) suffer greatly when under the full complement of signons? 6. Can the system be expanded? What cost? 7. Not withstanding monetary considerations, what system would you choose to replace the one you are currently using? 8. How many hours a week is your facility available to students? 9. What are your support and maintenance costs, i.e., operators, software license fees, monthly maintenance contracts, system programmers, etc? 10. What type of student controls and information does your system provide, i.e., signon time and CPU time limits, prevention of file copying, jobs statistics - length of job, number of jobs per assignment, etc? Please keep in mind that the above questionaire was not intended for just the UNIX community. We would appreciate any form of feed back regarding the above questions. Please skip over any questions which either do not pertain to your organization, or for which information is not readily available. We would also be interested in comments from the general community regarding the use of UNIX in teaching large introductory computing science courses. What changes or additions if any would be required(i.e. different shell etc). PLEASE NO FLAMES. We have to ask the following question(not my choice). Does anybody know of a PL/1 compiler(god help me) for unix? We thank you for taking the time to read this. If anybody is interested, We will post the results of this survey on the net.