[2210] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Low end users
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Horowitz)
Fri Jan 31 01:25:09 1992
To: perry@MCL.Unisys.COM (Dennis Perry)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 92 01:24:17 EST
From: Marc Horowitz <marc@Athena.MIT.EDU>
>> with distributed systems there is a system manager for each machine,
>> but he is not classfied as a systems manager and therefoe we don't
>> have one and are not paying for one. This is true of workstations as
>> well. Each workstation owner is his own system manager.
This may be true in many cases, but it is not a universal law. At
MIT, we have over 1000 workstations on campus. Almost 400 are in
public areas. Even if you want to call the private ws owners de-facto
maintainers, the public machines clearly have no such distinguised
individual, and many of the private machines are in the same
configuration as the public ones. With no customizations, no
maintenance is necessary. All 1000 of these machines (and their
servers) are maintained by a group of about 10 people, with 24x7 pager
service. The network is run by about five people, if you want to
count them, but they have other tasks as well, and the
one-person-per-machine model ignores the net, anyway.
(My example also excludes consultants and developers, but that still
only accounts for another 50 people, plus part-time student
consultants.)
My point is, that a distributed environment can be run without
significantly more people than a central computing facility (yes, MIT
has one of those, too). And with passable unix workstations available
for a few thousand dollars, the incremental cost to support a new user
is minimal.
Marc
