riddle@woton.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle ) (08/11/87)
> >In many cases, they hadn't even figured out how to use the equipment by > >the time it arrived. > > Examples please. Examples might be hard to come by, since they are potentially very embarassing both to the donors and the recipients of equipment. Let's just say that a (so they say) "top" school I once had a more than passing association with received a large mini from Three-Initial Corporation which was rarely even powered up (partly because it was delivered broken) and a bunch of workstations from Different Initial Corporation which received almost no use because they ran System V instead of Berkeley. That was just in the Unix side of the department; I heard rumors about similarly underused lisp machines in the AI lab. Please note that I am not trying to criticize the department I am describing (at least not on this count). The donors offered the equipment; can the school be faulted for not looking a gift horse in the mouth? But when it came down to *using* the equipment, it was often simply not worth the time and effort to work with a hodge-podge of different hardware and software just to make use of the donated machines -- especially since there were quite a few CPU cycles going unused on machines already on the network and running familiar software. (All of this pertains to equipment available for research and graduate instruction. Things were not quite so rosy in the undergraduate ghetto. But there, perhaps even more than at the graduate and research level, merely having CPU cycles available is only half the problem -- the machines and software in question have to go together to create some sort of a coherent instructional environment in order to be useable.) --- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.") --- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Shriners Burns Institute. --- riddle@woton.UUCP {ihnp4,harvard,seismo}!ut-sally!im4u!woton!riddle