A case for downgrading to PCs (was: WARNING: RANTING COMPUTER NUT...

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, David V. Corbin wrote: Yes, there IS a strong anti "PeeCee" bias. But the above quote is NEUTRAL, and does NOT show it. Let me tell you about when a school downgraded their computer facilities to PCs... It was in 1983,... The community college taught DP, using a PDP11. I'm not sure of the specific model, because I came in later. They taught COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, PASCAL, and did RJE to some sort of modern 360 (4381?), which also did, and still does, all of the administrative computing. The DP department computer had a third party drive, and they had LOTS of problems. The DEC field service people would get it running, and often had to exceed the speed limit to get out of sight before it went down again. But the real clincher was one time that it went down, and stayed down for MOST of the semester. Try teaching compiled languages without a computer! The head of the DP department made a major decision. They replaced the computer with a few dozen PCs! He had seen the corners that I had cut to save money on my PC, so they bought the 5150s with FDC cards and CGA cards, and put in aftermarket RAM, floppy drives, and B&W composite monitors. They ran PC-DOS 2.0, and ran IBM (rebadged MICROS~1) FORTRAN, COBOL, PASCAL, and BASIC. Now, the worst possible single malfunction would reduce capacity 5%, rather than disabling the entire department. And they hired me to teach a Microcomputer Operating System class (which I had been teaching with TRS-DOS and Apple-DOS on another campus). When the FORTRAN teacher unexpectedly left, they handed me his classes, and I got one of the much coveted tenure-track full-time positions! But the story doesn't quite end there, although most of the rest of the story is from third party sources who will deny it. They sold the [working, but unreliable] PDP-11 to a local school district. (Richmond, now "West Contra Costa") It was very cheap, because they made no secret of the problems that it had had. The school district called in PG&E (the power company) to connect it. The PG&E "technician" didn't understand the difference between delta and Y three phase! The computer was seriously damaged. (PG&E did the same thing with the wiring for the compressor in my automobile garage 10 years previously) PG&E cut a deal - that if everyone would go along with a fiction that the computer had been struck by lightning, then PG&E would buy the school district a new one! So,... the DP department got a lab full of PCs, which solved the issue of reliability. The R.U.S.D. got a brand new computer for next to nothing. Some PG&E technicians got some retraining. Meanwhile, on the other end of the campus, the electronics department also had a PDP-11, but the electronics department was soon being closed down because the administration believed that "NOBODY ever repairs anything anymore". The administration dumpstered the computer! One of the teachers salvaged it from the dumpster(s) in violation of school rules and policies. But he was having major problems of his own (divorce, moving, lack of storage space, lack of money to rent space,...) so he stuck the stuff into his back yard, intending to do something with it "right away", ... and the computer stuff stayed in his back yard until what was left of it was rescued a few months ago. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com "Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. Those that can't teach, administrate." == H.L. Mencken