The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 71, No. 8, Ed. 1 Friday, October 7, 1983 Page: 8 of 24
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Proposals for educational use of micros due October 15
by Bob Terry
The success of Rice researchers
in winning research grants to study
the use of microcomputers is
bringing a sizeable expansion in
the computing capacity available
to non-specialists. A subcommit-
tee of the university committee on
computing will evaluate proposals
for the immediate educational use
of 28 IBM microcomputers to be
available for use later this
semester.
Dr. Ken Kennedy, chairman of
the commitee on computer science
and principal investigator in a
large research project with IBM,
holds primary responsibility for
collecting and evaluating
proposals for uses of the 28 new
IBM PC-XTs.
"Other than the eight micros
GSA poll on child care
by Rebecca M. Monroy
Recently, Rice's Graduate
Student Association distributed a
survey sheet to the married
graduate students, faculty, and
adminstrative officials of Rice.
The survey addresses the feasibility
of a child care center for the Rice
community.
Members of the GSA hoped to
prove a need for such a center
through responses to the survey.
Guy Yandel, a graduate student
connected with the survey,
described it as a "gathering of
forces" in favor of the center.
Officially, the GSA has made no
contacts with the proper
authorities, but unofficially,
arguments against the center have
already ensued.
One debate concerned possible
locations for the center. Yandel
believes that there are two possible
sites. One would be the newly
acquired Tidelands Motor Inn, a
site to be developed specifically as
housing for graduate students.
Another possible site would be
m ., _ -r'tcVe^ al .
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m M,a^ents
caW
Herring Hall, which is now under
construction.
Although the survey is
addressed to married graduate
students, faculty, and administra-
tion with children, Yandel insists
that the center would be open to
the general Rice community. A fee
for service would naturally follow,
but the center would charge
considerably less than outside
facilities.
The poll consists of the
following questions:
1. How many children do you
have?
2. If there were a state-certified
Child Care Center on campus,
would you be interested in utilizing
this service?
3. If you were interested, on
what days of the weeks and at what
times of the day would you need
the service?
For copies of this questionnaire
or further information, contact
Tom Mackey, history, at campus
extension 4749 or Guy Yandel,
Jones School, at ext. 3459.
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'()Ifer based on space availability
reserved exclusively for computer
science research, 20 machines will
be made available for whatever
demand exists in the university,"
Kennedy said. "In order to allocate
the use of these machines fairly, I
have asked the computer
committee to appoint a
subcommittee to evaluate
proposals."
In a memo sent out last month,
Kennedy asked all academic
department heads to submit
proposals for computer time by
October 15. "Priority will be
given," he said, "to undergraduate
education and to projects that lack
other facilities if their proposal is
not successful. We want proposals
from anybody with a good idea, be
it a student or department — those
we can't fill now will be useful in
planning the other stages of
growth and in winning the interest
of (computer companies)."
According to Kennedy's memo
these proposals should include:
1) Name and department of
sponsor,
2) A description of the course or
activity in which the PC's will be
used,
3) A discussion of how the PC's
will enhance the course or activity,
4) The facilities that would be
used if the proposal is not
successful.
5) An estimate of the total
number of student hours required
and the schedule for those hours.
For example, if you expect 25
students and they would each need
two hours every two weeks for
fourteen weeks, it would require
350 student hours. The schedule
should be as specific as possible.
Assistant ICSA Director Farrell
Gerbode commented, "We are
really hoping that students and
departments can think of things to
do with these. Right now we're
pushing to have them operating by
the dedication of the Mudd
building on October 21."
dnix settlement protects distribution
continued from page 1
functionality. The biochemists
were not interested in program
development, but rather in using
programs produced by others that
only ran under VMS."
Dave Johnson, another
graduate student, pinpointed a
major problem with VMS from a
programmer's viewpoint. "UNIX
has a large number of subroutines,
and averages around three
parameters to a system call. With
VMS you sometimes have
hundreds of options to set." In
other words, one has to feed VMS
far more information in order to
get action out of it than is the case
with UNIX.
After running both systems for a
time, the inconvenience of
switching back and forth led the
researchers to look for a program
that would allow their computers
to execute UNIX programs under
a VMS environment. Such
programs are called emulators,
because they are intended to
imitate a system so well that for
most purposes neither the people
nor the programs accessing it can
detect any difference from the real
thing.
The group thought they had
found such a program in EUNICE,
stated Johnson. "We got it when it
was just being released — it was
not commercial, was unpolished,
and it just barely worked.
EUNICE had several problems
in the way it operated, problems
which necessitated modifying
UNIX programs before they could
function with it. This defeated the
whole purpose of an emulator,
which is to avoid having to revise1
already tested, working programs.
For almost a year the grad
students tried to fix EUNICE, first
by writing programs that would
not stop EUNICE errors, but
would correct them before they
reached a higher-level program or
user. These patches were
insufficient, so Rice contracted
with SRI to receive a copy of the
original source code in order to
modify it. As part of the contract,
Caplinger mentioned, "we agreed
to send any changes we made back
to SRI, and not give the source
code to anyone else."
When the source code arrived,
however, computer science
programmers soon decided that
the differences between what
EUNICE did and what they
wanted a UNIX emulator to do
were just too great. This, and the
transfer of one of the principal
EUNICE programmers from SRI
to another firm led them to
consider the SRI program as a
dead end and proceed to develop
their own emulator.
As early as October 1981,
Johnson, then an undergraduate,
had begun work on Phoenix
(which he and fellow "comp jocks"
refer to as 0nix), their solution to
the problem of UNIX emulation
under a VMS system. The first
version of Phoenix for general
users was installed on September
10, 1982.
Said Caplinger, "When we
started getting a usable system we
began to think of distributing it (on
a distribution cost basis) to people
because EUNICE didn't work and
was fairly expensive. About the
time we first started thinking about
distributing, SRI sold the rights to
EUNICE to The Wollongong
Group (a Palo Alto, California,
firm). They announced EUNICE
as a commercial product and threw
programmers at it to make it a
better system."
Johnson, who has by
Caplinger's estimate written 80
percent of the Phoenix code,
explained that the two programs
are vastly different. "Phoenix
works, EUNICE doesn't," he said.
"I know of only one bug in
Phoenix that EUNICE could
handle better, and there are
innumberable places where
EUNICE doesn't even come
close," Johnson said.
In its design, programmers took
the view, "EUNICE does it this
way, but EUNICE doesn't work,
so let's go back to basic principles
and do it right," commented
Caplinger. Not only was Phoenix
written completely separately from
EUNICE, but it also went through
two complete rewrites during its
development, as well as less major
revisions.
The value of the Phoenix
program was estimated by
Caplinger to be on the order of
$125,000, if one considers only the
cost of the programmer-hours
invested. Kennedy mentioned that
he ha;s already received over 300
inquiries about the system, despite
the fact that information has
spread purely by word-of-mouth.
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The Rice Thresher, October 7, 1983, page 8
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Ekren, Christopher. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 71, No. 8, Ed. 1 Friday, October 7, 1983, newspaper, October 7, 1983; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245540/m1/8/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.