Toward a uniform user interface at UNCG
Authors: M. R. Pratto
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User Services (1989)

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has operated one or more Digital VAX computers running VMS for the benefit of the academic community for about ten years. Currently we operate a VAX Cluster consisting of one VAX 8700 and two VAX 780s. We have approximately 3000 users with individual usernames per semester. Faculty accounts for research are renewed automatically each year and any faculty member who wishes to have an account may do so. Graduate students may also have research accounts, but these accounts are renewed by request only. Each faculty member or graduate student has a disk quota on one of the disk volumes attached to the cluster. In addition, one of the disk volumes is known as SCRATCH. Any person with an account on the Cluster, including students in classes, may use any amount of space available on the SCRATCH pack for a minimum of 24 hours. Class accounts are created each semester at the request of the instructors. Instructors then assign individual usernames and password to the students in their classes. Students taking more than one class have more than one username. At the end of the semester the class accounts and the usernames of the students are removed from the system. Software is relatively easy to use on the VAX Cluster because it is available by name. Thus, to use SPSSX, a user specifies interactively or in a command file SPSSX. Users do not know nor do they need to where the software resides. Several of the disk packs on the cluster are used by the system to store the application software. Each application has a symbol by which it is known interactively and in command files. For example, users do not need to know where the statistics packages are, but only need to know the names of the packages desired. The VAX Cluster was used for all academic computing on campus until 1986 when the first laboratory of microcomputers was established. People are, therefore, quite accustomed to the VAX Cluster and the way it is configured for our campus. At first the microcomputers were used as stand alone machines. As we added microcomputers we found it easier to manage large numbers of microcomputers in a room with Novell Netware. As a consequence, the Academic Computing Center at UNCG has created UNCGNET for our campus Novell networks. We now have Novell networked labs in several buildings on campus. The labs are networked within via thin-wire Ethernet and the labs are connected to the campus-wide broadband Ethernet backbone. These labs have different printers attached to their servers. UNCGNET allows any user in lab to select any server in any lab and any printer. We have about 3000 network users per semester. Since there are so many users who may use any of the servers and since there is not a quick way to establish and, even more importantly, to eliminate usernames, we do not assign individual usernames to the students. As part of the UNCGNET development we are working toward a uniform user interface on all servers. This user interface is similar to what we have on our VAXcluster. For example, users may login to any server and merely state WP50 at the prompt to access Word Perfect, version 5.0. If one server is not available, users will feel comfortable on any other server. In addition to the user interface change, we changed the structure of all network hard disks in a manner similar to our VAXcluster disks. Faculty users have access to areas where they may store data files for students, and software resides in special directories, but the user need not know where.