College breaks from trend and installs Micro VAX II

Press, 25 February 1986, Page 24

College breaks from trend and installs Micro VAX II

Lincoln College’s latest computer acquisition is a MicroVAX II — the first such computer to be installed in the South Island.

The MicroVAX 11, made by Digital Equipment Corporation joins a VAX-11/ 780 and a VAX-11/750 in the computer room of the centre for computing and biometrics.

It was chosen to provide computing power for a computer laboratory to be used by the 200 first year students studying for a Bachelor of Agricultural Commerce degree. Situated in a building next door to the computer centre, the laboratory has been equipped with 20 terminals (including eight Digital VT24O graphics terminals) connected to the MicroVAX 11. Students will use the terminals for hands-on experience in spreadsheets, word processing, file management, database management and business graphics. The software packages used are similar, to the popular micro-

computer package, but run on VAX computers. Although more expensive than a set of 20 networked microcomputers, the MicroVAX II was preferred by staff at the centre.

In spite of the trend by other New Zealand educational institutions to install networked microcomputers, the staff at Lincoln College believed that there were limitations in using networked microcomputers for teaching purposes.

Mr Mountier had recently been overseas and found that only a couple of Australian universities were using microcomputers, and this was purely to teach Pascal programming. “In May last year we considered getting a room full of micros,” explained Mr Mountier. “We went a bit deeper and found some of the limitations. “You couldn’t enforce disc quotas and there was no way of accounting for students’ use. Additionally, the availability of some of

the more popular software, for use on a network was unclear to say the least.

“We couldn’t get anything firm about Lotus 1-2-3 being used on a network and buying multiple copies of Open Access was going to be quite dear. “The general problems of management, both of updating software and protecting against illegal copying, seems a huge problem to cope with,” said Mr Mountier.

The centre was wanting to use software of commercial value, such as word processing and spreadsheet software and believed it could not guard against the software being pirated if the software was run on microcomputers.

In one overseas university Mr Mountier visited, each microcomputer had one of its floppy disc drives equipped with a padlock so that the software could not be removed.

Lincoln’s new MicroVAX II has 210 megabytes of disc storage and five megabytes of main memory. The staff at the centre are “fairly convinced” that it can handle the work of 20 users, given that student use is often light and that the

students will not all be requesting heavy processing at the same time. Although it is intended that the MicroVAX II by itself will handle the laboratory terminals, any of the terminals can be switched through to either of the other two VAX computers, provided that the user is authorised to use that VAX.

This facility is available because the three VAX computers are connected by an Ethernet local area network, which gives a high speed connection between the computers and allows resources to be shared across the network.

Initially the Ethernet network was installed as the most economical way to link the first two VAX computers together. The new MicroVAX II has also been connected-to the network and some of the terminals in the college now connect through a terminal server directly into the network, rather than connecting to a particular VAX. The terminal server then routes the terminal user onto one of the three VAX computers.

Eventually the centre plans to extend the Ethernet network around the campus.