From: technews@iitmax.iit.edu (Kevin Kadow)
Subject: Re: Computers for students, by students.
Followup-To: alt.bbs.internet
Summary: Has anybody had positive experiences with student run UNIX (bbs)
Organization: ACM/Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 23:09:07 GMT

        We (The association for Computing Machinery, IIT chapter) are
working to obtain a computer for student use, which would be purchased by
the Student Leadership Committee, which administers the Student Activities
fund.

        One of the requests the Finance Board (the student leaders who make
financial decisions) has made is that before they will consider approval we
must provide them with information from:

"... other universities or groups outside of IIT who could advocate the
addition of such a system, or ideally, have made such an addtion themselves."

     Basically, what I really need is letters (A short FAX would be great)
from other people who have student run systems, detailing how they were
arranged, who operates them, and how their students benefit.

                                        Kevin Kadow
                                        Chairman ACM/IIT
                                
VOICE: (312) 567-3427                   FAX: (312) 567-8882


(P.S. Below is some extra background information on what we are planning
and on justifications. Any E-mailed suggestions would be appreciated.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
        The machine (a 486/33), which will be accessible through the many
terminals around campus and via the current dial-up lines, would provide
the students and student organizations with a Bulletin Board System (BBS)
for announcements, discussion, and the like. This system will run under
UNIX, and the message sections will be under usenet news.

        Other services will include meeting notices, and user-to-user chat,
as well as the usual internet services and shareware files which can be
copied by downloading with X/Y/Z-modem, Kermit,and FTP.

It has been suggested that we use or add onto the current computers, but
this approach has several drawbacks:

    Currently the only machines that all students can access are an
overburdened VAX cluster running VMS/DCL and a NeXT running MACH. Both have
very little free disk space, memory, or CPU time.

The VAX is used for a large amount of coursework and for research, does NOT
offer a usenet news reader, and can become horrendously slow at times
(especially around finals week).

The second system,a NeXT station which is open to all students, often has
as many as 8 MUD's (multi-user games) running, crashes very often (3-5
times per week) and is used for some research. This offers a very limited
news reader, and can be very slow. When a user is on the console (graphical
interface) everything grinds to a halt.

        The NeXT  News reader, gets the news from a machine on campus which
is open *ONLY* to research and students for the duration of certain
courses, and which has so little free space that news expires in ONE DAY.

-- 
    Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

technews@iitmax.iit.edu                           kadokev@harpo.iit.edu
                         My Employer Disagrees.
Newsgroups: comp.edu