gumby@mit-eddie.UUCP (David Vinayak Wallace) (02/05/84)
Date: Sun, 29-Jan-84 13:50:49 EST
From: spoo at utcsrgv.UUCP (Suk Lee)
At present, MIT is not handing "big bags of money" to Apple to buy their
MacIntosh. They just received a *pile* of equipment from HP (yay!) for
use in one of their undergraduate courses, and it appears that for now
they won't be needing any more.
That's not really true. The HP machines are just for two undergrad EECS
classes; there are only about 50 or 100 of the things. MIT has just
started a project (called Athena) involving DEC and IBM. The two
companies gave $50M in grants and equipment to spread IBM PC's and some
flavor of DEC micro around campus, not just in EECS. In addition
Mainframes are provided for file- and namespace serving.
Apple approached MIT, but was rejected. The story is that their offer
wasn't good enough, but I don't have any real bits on this.
It's not at all true that we "won't be needing any more" computers.
Micros running unix can't do very much; I expecyt that in a couple of
years, once they become used to computers as commonplace objects, people
will be rejecting these machines as too weak. After all, that happens
in EECS, doesn't it?
david