coltoff (10/21/82)
There was a story in the Phila. Inquirer this morning about Drexel University requiring **ALL** incoming freshman, starting next year, to buy personal computers. Now,while I can't come up with good solid reasons why this is a dumb, stupid, idiotic, ^&@&*, &*#*&@, etc. idea something about it rubs me the wrong way. I think it is great to teach computer literacy but this is different than requiring everyone to take Phys Ed. The article claimed that the school sees this as a good way for handing in homework assignments and projects. (do they think that everyones disks are compatible? or do they want to `diff' to find cheaters). What they are doing is buying large quantities of one machine to offer a good discount to the students. What if you don't want to learn CPM or whatever but must to meet school requirements. Why should liberal arts students have to by a computer to learn computer literacy? Some may say that you can always sell them when you graduate but the used computer market is not like selling a used text book. Floppy disk drives get tired and chips can get amnesia. What about the serious student who buys what is a decent machine now and finds that the courses are structured around a differnt one in two years. Enough said by me. Anyone out there want to give me better reasons for being bothered bt this. Does someone want to justify Drexels' position? By the way they claim that Carnegie-Mellon and other schools will be doing the same in the next few years. I really hope this isn't a new trend.
renner (10/22/82)
#R:burdvax:-24200:uiucdcs:9700016:000:113 uiucdcs!renner Oct 22 14:12:00 1982 It doesn't bother me all that much. If you don't want to buy the machine, you can always go to another school.
david (10/23/82)
#R:burdvax:-24200:pur-ee:5400010:000:1406 pur-ee!david Oct 22 18:02:00 1982 It seems like that will be "the shape of things to come". Here at just the Purdue EE school, we have some freshman programming classes of 200-300 people. It is almost impossible for an EE to go through school without programming in at least 5 classes. Most of the processing time on the system is spent editing files. You don't need a Vax to edit most files! Yet we see outrageous load and user averages due mostly to file manipulation. To solve part of the problem, The school bought a second Vax and moved half the accounts to the new machine. The problem we now see is people connecting to one machine from the other because they see the first open terminal and not necessarily the one their account is on. Consequently, instead of having half the users on each machine, we have the same number of users on TWO machines (with a good percentage being those connect to the other Vax). As a student I wouldn't like purchasing any equipment that I'll hardly use after I leave. But the trade-off could be it will improve my turn-around when I need it. And if I didn't like the PC, I could sell it to some unsuspecting freshman. I'd imagine in the specific case, a company will open up that will rent PC's to students much the same way companies rent dorm refrigerators, anyway. And The nice thing is I'm graduating and I won't have to worry about it after May! Dave White pur-ee!david
mcewan (10/23/82)
#R:burdvax:-24200:uiucdcs:9700017:000:391 uiucdcs!mcewan Oct 23 01:54:00 1982 If you think that's bad, get this: out here at the University of Illinois they actually require students to buy BOOKS. I think its ridiculous to require that someone who comes here on a football scholarship be able to read. You can spend hundreds of dollars on books you'll never look at after the course is finished. Obviously someone in the university has made a deal with some publisher.
knudsen (10/30/82)
I fully agree with whoever mentioned the value of student computer usage with respect to word processing. In grad school I did several term papers using MIT's CTSS 7094 typeset-runoff. I was afraid my master's thesis was too big for the system, so (regretably) did not use it. At Carnegie, I did my entire PhD thesis on an early Xerox graphic printer word processing system. Granted, I'm a CS graduate, but I used word processing just like anyone else. Shame that WP is considered "office only" or "woman's work". It was taken for granted that every college freshman needs a typewriter; but boy, wouldn't I have loved a word processing terminal back then!!!