tihor@acf4.UUCP (03/19/84)
I would think that IBM PCs would be more than adequate for many undergraduate computing courses, if you had enough of them (PCs). That may be true. There are two concerns. They provide a different set of "coping with the computer" skills than more traditional large machines. This may be better or worse depends on one's view of such en passant education. The more inportant concern is the number of PC's required. Our experiences with such an experiment strongly supported by several of the computer science professors involved was that normal interactive time-sharing computers support a ratio of 20 students per terminal but the PC's supported just over 10. They are certainly adequate for "intro to programming" classes. They seemed adequate to providing services for a basic "Intro..." class but do so at a significantly greater cost per student for a constant level of support. Again out figure indicate between 25% and 100% more $'s for similar levels of support. Of course with PC's we have the option of moving to either greater levels of support and facilities at only somewhat more additional money than 1.4 * current facilities, or as seems to happen in many institutions that are going PC-crazy supply lower grades of service for about the same money. Furthermore, you can let students hack around with toy operating systems in assembler and crash only their own machines rather than some expensive multi-user machine like a pdp-11/40 or 45 that has to run stand-alone for such a course (to allow crashes). We have also tried this. The problem is that while they can only crash their little machine, they don;t have any of the nice big machine features available for debugging. For teaching purposes I still prefer a simulator where they can use high level tools or a testbed style system linking the small mahcine with a powerful machine to serve as a testing and debugging tool.