[637] in APO News
Terminal server(s) needed temporarily for high-school program
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (drw@bourbaki.mit.edu)
Wed Jan 5 21:28:27 1994
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 94 21:22:52 EST
From: drw@bourbaki.mit.edu
To: apo@ai.mit.edu
Reply-To: drw@bourbaki.mit.edu
Cc: drw@bourbaki.mit.edu
I am working on setting up the computer system for a world-affairs
simulation for high-school students that will be held on Feb 12 and
13, 1994 in Cambridge (Boston), MA. We have sources for everything we
need, EXCEPT we need four or five "terminal servers" (e.g., Annex
boxes, Xyplex boxes) for connecting the user's terminals to the
central server. It turns out that these are impossible to rent and
far too expensive to buy. At a minimum, we need to borrow them for
one weekend (for the program) and the preceeding weekend (to make sure
that they work in our system). Would anybody have a few lying around
that we could borrow on these weekends?
A detailed discription of the CRISIS simulation and the equipment
situation follows.
Thanks,
Dale
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends,
For the last five years, the MIT Educational Studies Program has
sponsored CRISIS, a two-day political-military-economic simulation of
world affairs, for high school students from eastern Massachusetts.
CRISIS has been very popular, with participation doubling each year.
It has grown so popular, that now we need your help.
One of the recurring problems has been getting messages between
participants, both between teams and between teams and Control. For
CRISIS, 1993, we recruited about twenty people to sit in an Athena
workstation cluster madly typing whatever came in so that we could
print a "newsletter" each game week (about every thirty minutes) to
keep all participants informed of what was going on. The people who
helped worked tirelessly, and feverishly, but we learned to our regret
that the thirty minute delay caused by collecting material made the
newsletter too slow to be of much use. We resolved to find a better
way for 1994.
The answer that comes easily to people from MIT is to set up a
computer network. Dale Worley has taken charge of that, and worked
out the basic requirements of the system. We will try to hook up
about forty VT-100 terminals, one for each team, to a central server
through four eight-port servers. Dale has also been pricing this out,
and found that the minimum rentals for the the five key pieces is
about five times what we can afford. And so we are turning to our
contacts out in the real world.
Might you have, or through your employer have access to, any of these
pieces of hardware? CRISIS, 1994, is scheduled for the weekend of
February 12-13 in building E51, but we would like to borrow these things
starting in mid-January so we can assemble the network and be certain it
works. Alternative ideas for system design would also be welcome.
If you can help us in any way, please contact Dale Worley at
drw@math.mit.edu.
Thanks for whatever you can do.
Yours in service,
Yale Zussman
Director
Crisis Program
MIT Educational Studies Program
PS: Recipients of this message are welcome to attend CRISIS. Who knows,
you may find yourself receiving an assignment and becoming part of the
game!
