[4188] in Consulting_FYI
Neat Extracts from Jim Bruce's Report to the Academic Council
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Sep 25 14:48:52 1991
From: kevles@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 91 14:49:31 -0400
To: cfyi@Athena.MIT.EDU
Jim said:
SEPTEMBER 24, 1991 - Notes for Academic Council Presentation
* Welcome to Athena Folder - On September 3rd I reported briefly to you on
the start-up of Athena and distributed a Welcome folder. We distributed
some 1700 of those folders primarily to incoming first year students and new
graduate students.
* The Athena environment:
- 385 workstations are deployed in 20 public clusters.
- 266 workstations are deployed in departmental clusters.
- 204 workstations are in private offices.
- 31 workstations are in five living groups.
- 886 total workstations in the environment not counting staff machines
(219) and servers (100). NOTE: Less than 50 departmental machines were
returned.
- Included in the deployed workstations are about 90 new DecStation 3100s
and 40 new IBM RS6000s.
* Registration:
- By the start of Rush, 308 (29%) first year students (1080) had accounts;
by Registration Day this number had increased to 812 (75%); and today
stands around 953 (88%). Comparing this year's data to last year's, about
the same number of students had accounts by the time Rush began, but by
Registration Day about 8% more freshmen had accounts this year than last.
- Today: First Year 88%
Second Year 93%
Third Year 95%
Fourth Year 96%
Graduate 69%
* Minicourses -
- During R/O week, we offered multiple sessions of three minicourses to
introduce new students to the Athena Computing Environment:
How to Get Around Athena
Basic Word Processing and Electronic Mail
Advanced Word Processing
About 1300 registrations this year during R/O Week compared to 850 last
year. About 200 in the first week of classes compared to 280 last year.
* Unique Logons:
- One measure of system utilization is the number of different individuals
who use the system each day. In the two week period surrounding
Registration Day, the number of different individuals using the
environment averaged over 40% higher than the same period last fall.
- Last week, unique logons per day exceeded 4200 on three days - Monday,
Tuesday, and Thursday - a level that did not occur until April last year.
(The peak unique logon figure last year was just under 4300.) On
Wednesday and Friday, the unique logons were around 4100 each day.
- We do not know what the capacity of the system is. We believe that when
you are seeing 10 logons per day from any given workstation you are doing
quite well. This implies that you should begin to see lines waiting for
workstations when you get to the 4000 logon-level. We did see lines last
year in some of the clusters and I expect we will see them again early in
the current term.
* Subjects using Athena
- This year we are aware of some 100 subjects that are using Athena. The
list is not 100% accurate. It is compiled from subjects we know are using
the system, from questions coming into OLC, from requests for storage for
subject materials, etc. This is about the same as last year.
* Other usage measures:
- Electronic directory - Last week there were 12,687 requests made to the
on-line telephone directory, an average of about 2,000 per business day
and 1,000 per day on the weekends.
- On-Line Help (OLH) - During the two week period beginning mid-week
before registration day, there were an average of 750 startups of the OLH
system per day with a total of 2,600 modules viewed.
- Electronic mail
Last week Athena Messages 55,350
9/16-22 Deliveries 141,222
MIT Messages 10,187 65,537
Deliveries 17,575 158,797
Same week, Athena Messages 41,215
prior year Deliveries 64,981
MIT Messages 3,230 44,445
Deliveries 6,373 71,354
* Ergonomic Issues
- When the clusters were initially built, we knew nothing about the proper
height of keyboards, or that the display should be at least 24" away from
your eyes and straight ahead, or carpal tunnel syndrome. Now we know
about all three, and sooner or later we will have to make major changes in
the design of our public and departmental clusters.
