In late 1997 one of the authors was given the specific charge of managing the nearly non-existant network facilities of the economics department of Tohoku University. Since then the authors have been involved in planning, executing and operating the network of the economics department. Also, in order to analyse and understand the problem better the authors carried out several sample surveys among teachers,staff and students of the department and recorded network and computer related statistics in the department since 1997. 1.1 Computing and network facilities in the department. They can use personal notebook computers during lectures.
Students can have network access at all times from the designated computer room.
On the average about 100-150 students access the network from the computer room daily. Students can also have network access using their personal computers during seminars and discussions in the networked seminar room. Graduate students can have Internet access from their personalised desktops in their respective laboratories. Table 2 shows the number of teachers, students and other staff and the network users among them in the Faculty of Economics and, the Graduate School of Economics and Management. The number of computers in the department is shown in Table 1.