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From: nowlin@ihu1e.UUCP (Jerry Nowlin)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Purdue
Message-ID: <291@ihu1e.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 6-Aug-84 14:16:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihu1e.291
Posted: Mon Aug  6 14:16:54 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Aug-84 08:07:25 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 32

.

I went to school at Purdue for 4 years and then worked there for almost 7.   I
wouldn't  trade those years for anything.  There are lots of good things about
Purdue.

From the perspective of the computer systems on campus  there  could  be  some
improvements  though.  Take the Engineering Computer Network (ECN).  (I'm glad
I don't have to anymore) It's dominated by a bunch of ivory tower, holier than
thou,  self proclaimed gurus who consider the users a nuisance to be tolerated
so they can continue to obtain the funding to monkey around with their own pet
projects.   Not all the ECN system administrators are that way.  Some try very
hard to help users  with  their  problems.   Others  might  as  well  have  an
answering  machine  hooked  to their phone that plays "read the documentation"
and then hangs up.

When they upgraded from 4.1 to 4.2bsd they assured everyone they wouldn't even
notice  the  change  except  for  the improvement in disk transfer speed.  The
first day most people couldn't log in all the way without a  flurry  of  error
messages,  "nroff" didn't work, and to top it off disk transfers were actually
slower at first.  This was because of the little "improvements" that ECN  made
to  the  standard  Berkeley distribution.  These little enhancements also made
ECN's version incompatible with the other two entities on campus that  operate
UNIX  systems,  the  Purdue University Computer Center (PUCC) and the Computer
Science department.

I've been gone about 6 months now and while I miss Purdue I don't miss ECN  at
all.   I'm  curious  though.   Anybody  know  whether or not ECN got 4.2 to go
faster than 4.1 or did they settle for an improvement in name only?

Jerry Nowlin
ihnp4!ihu1e!nowlin