Students are important, but if the campus is going to be a flagship campus, research cannot be slighted. In this respect, some of the colleges really need good mainframe resources, and some people wanted the mainframe issues to be higher on the list of services. A few people expressed concerns about moving to workstations, away from the mainframe environment. Colleges can't afford to purchase high-powered workstations which can handle their current mainframe activities. Also, software licensing is not only expensive in terms of the actual costs, but also in terms of the manpower expended to maintain the software licenses.
Some applications are just too big to work on workstations.
Without having mainframe computing available, some research projects would need to be closed down. The question of consolidated operation was mentioned, and it was indicated that the budget savings of doing such a move must be closely examined. The academic community cannot afford to let this slide. The uncertainty about the future of mainframes has caused some real problems in the colleges. Some users feel like they are being left out in the cold, with the Unisys going away and discussions about the future of the IBM systems.