jellinghaus-robert@CS.Yale.EDU (Rob Jellinghaus) (04/14/90)
I'm a computing assistant here at Yale; I help maintain the public Macintosh
clusters we have on campus. The Computer Center here maintains a group of
about six to ten Macs in each of the dorms on campus, as well as four larger
clusters (of ten or more Macs each) in central campus locations. And we've
got a problem.
Almost all our Macs at present are either Mac Pluses or Mac SEs, all with
1 meg of memory and two 800K drives. What with System 7.0 coming down the
pike and all, we're trying to plan for the future, and figure out what up-
grades we'll need and when.
One of our main concerns is thinking in terms of getting machines that can
run System 7--after all, more and more applications are going to be needing
its features after it comes out and starts being used, and historically
relying on older Systems or Macs after they've been obsoleted is no way to
do right by your users (and if you don't believe me, how many people out
there are still running MFS Systems? Raise your hands!).
More memory may well be in the cards, since 2 megs of memory is really useful
even without its being required by System 7. But what is _not_ going to be
feasible is a hard drive on every computer--and this worries us, since I have
recently heard here that System 7 will _require_ a hard drive. (Not only is
there not enough money to finance hard drives, but they would be completely
worked over by the malignant hackers and compulsive power users that every
large Mac installation has to deal with.) We are, however, considering net-
working some of the central clusters in the near future, and extending the
network in the coming years. Maintaining networks is a lot easier than main-
taining hard drives, since there are utilities that help with net security,
and the only thing someone can do is screw up the central server, not some
random hard drive off in some dorm somewhere.
So my question is: what kind of Mac configuration should we be shooting for
in order to run System 7? Is there _any_ hope that a faster Appletalk or
something will come along, and enable us to run System 7 off of a network?
If not, are we condemned to System 6, and ultimate obsolescence as future
software leaves our installation behind?
Apple people, if you have any helpful information on what System 7 will and
won't require, or whether it'll be able to work in the ways we need it to
work, please send me email. Anyone else at other campuses or companies:
if you're grappling with similar concerns, let me know what you've come up
with. All replies will be summarized and posted.
Thanks for helping me help Yale to move smoothly along the rocky road of
the Mac's progress!
Rob Jellinghaus | "Next time you see a lie being spread or a
jellinghaus-robert@CS.Yale.EDU | bad decision being made out of sheer ignor-
ROBERTJ@{yalecs,yalevm}.BITNET | ance, pause, and think of hypertext."
{everyone}!decvax!yale!robertj | -- K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_