ncmagel@ndsuvax.UUCP (ken magel) (07/04/88)
What should the role of student-owned computers be in Computer Science undergraduate education? SOme schools require all students or at least all CS majors to purchase microcomputers usaully at special prices. IS this what we should all be doing? WHy or why not? How about software? As OS/2 and other more sophisticated micro operating systems increase in costs and machine hardware requirements, how can we provide students with these as well for their own machines? What of the need or desire to update software every few months? Is a diversity of machines and software among students desireable, acceptable, or too difficult to handle?
elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) (07/07/88)
In message <1019@ndsuvax.UUCP>, ncmagel@ndsuvax.UUCP (ken magel) says: >undergraduate education? SOme schools require all students or at least all >CS majors to purchase microcomputers usaully at special prices. IS this what >we should all be doing? WHy or why not? How about software? As OS/2 and In a word: BAD IDEA. The main reason is that university administrators have proven nearly universally incompetent in detirmining what technology will be the "leading edge" in years to come. For example, back when the 8088 was a fairly new processor, Zenith intrduced a computer called the Z-100. Since IBM hadn'T introduced their PC yet, it had S-100 slots, and was otherwise incompatible with the IBM PC. One university (whose name I forget) required that its students all buy the Z-100, because it was the "leading edge" at the time. Now those students are stuck with a bunch of white elephants (or were stuck, I should say... I imagine the last class of Z-100 users should have graduated in May). The other alternative is to stick the students with obsolete machines, like, for example, IBM XT clones with 8088 processors. The equivalent of requiring CP/M in 1982. I am currently using a microcomputer with a multi-tasking message-passing OS and sophisticated bit-mapped windowing system, and practically die every time I have to go back to a DOS machine and stare at an A> prompt. In other words, neither option is really acceptable... either you end up sticking the students with white elephants (e.g. 128K Macintoshes!), if you try to make them buy machines only recently upon the market, or, you end up making them buy machines which were obsolete 3 years ago (e.g. the CP/M machines in 1982, and MS-DOS machines this very moment). >Is a diversity of machines and software among students desireable, acceptable, >or too difficult to handle? The basic problem with diversity is that you can't do classwork on your machine, you have to go somewhere else to do it (either via telecommunications, or by actually going to a computer lab on-campus somewhere, something reprhensible to us commuting students). If the administrators insist upon making the students use a PC lab, then the telecommunications option is out because PC-DOS is too primitive to accomodate dial-up users. That's my basic complaint about the proliferation of PC labs everywhere..... they're damned inconvenient. I have to put up with primitive operating systems, cheap buggy compilers (Turbo Pascal? Turbo C? BARF!), and other inconveniences that don't encumber my machine at home. Plus, instructors end up having to purposely limit the assignments they give their students, simply because the hardware is not powerful enough to handle it (e.g. you aren't going to teach ADA on a 512K 8088-based machine with two floppies, which is a typical low-cost configuration many places, dating back to the days before cheap hard drives). You might be able to buy 500 microcomputers for the same price as a minicomputer setup capable of handling ~100-120 users. But the economy and convenience are only illusionary, if it won't do what you want it to do, or if it forces you to deal with slow outmoded hardware and primitive operating systems (or any combination of the two -- e.g. VM/CMS certainly qualifies as "primitive", despite the baggage that's been hung off the edges of the CP/M-like system over the past 20 years). The only places that required microcomputer purchases might fit into are the "upscale" universities (tuition-wise) where spending $2,000 for a new machine every year would be no big deal. For one thing, a low-cost system of around $1500 is less than 1/10th of the typical tuition for a private university. At low-cost public institutions, such as the one I attend (USL) or the university of the original poster (North Dakota State University), required PC purchases would be quite silly -- for one thing, the price of a PC with all the necessary software (an even bigger expense than the hardware) ends up costing more than a full semester at a fairly typical public university. Answer to the question "what should the role of student-owned computers be": as an accessory for the development cycles, as a prototyping tool, in short, as whatever the student wants to do with it -- and what students already are doing with it today. As long as central computing facilities are available for standardization and for those students without microcomputers, there's little problem. -- Eric Lee Green ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.