[70] in Resnet-Forum
Why?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Haynes)
Tue Nov 30 02:56:52 1993
From: haynes@cats.ucsc.edu (Jim Haynes)
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 23:43:38 -0800
To: resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
I'm not trying to be argumentative; I think residential networking is
a Good Thing. But I'd like to see a list of the reasons people think
it should be done, and maybe the relative weights when there are
several reasons. I can think of some reasons by armchair speculation.
Your reasons may in fact be quite different and probably include some that
I haven't thought of.
1. Students are asking for it - and I guess this could be translated
into "increase the desirability (or marketability) of on-campus housing".
2. If you don't give it to them the students will devour all the dialup
modems you can provide; and networking is cheaper than all those modems
and the phone lines to serve them. (or easier to recover the cost of)
3. Leverage the capital of student-owned machines so the school doesn't
have to provide so many out of its own funds (and you consider networking
is necessary to achieve that leveraging; offline student-owned machines
are significantly less useful).
3a. It isn't the cost of the machines, it's the costs of floor space and
furniture that you hope to save with student-owned machines. Or the
costs of heating, cooling, lighting, and security.
4. You want to foster an academic environment in which the students
accept the computer simply another item for the personal tool kit, like
the telephone, the pencil, and the dictionary.
5. You have some particular goal (e.g. ability to contact all students
via e-mail) for which residential networking is an intermediary.
6. It's an experiment to see what will develop when students have
computers in their living quarters.
7. Maybe the cost of distributing software is an issue: students can't
afford to buy their own copies of all the software you want them to run,
but you can get a license to distribute it from servers over the network
at a better price - another reason why student-owned computers are of
less value to the institution if they are not networked.
8. It's simply an idea whose time has come - ten years from now we won't
even think about the reasons for residential networking because it's
unthinkable not to have it. (Or will we wish we had waited a few years
for wireless networking and not spent all that money on wire?)
9. It's a way to make the institution more attractive to prospective
students, in competition with other institutions.
10. Students are coming from such computer-rich home environments that
they will feel deprived if they can't have networked computers in
their living quarters.
