From Spring 1995 through Mid 1997 I volunteered at The Computer School in New York City. This is one of the mini-schools in the old IS44 building. It's a selective public middle-school. Kids are interviewed, and they choose for a broad spectrum of kids. The Computer School served as the computer lab to the other mini-schools in the building.
I came in one or two Sundays a month, more if necessary, less if I was lucky. At the beginning of the project I was a former (laid-off) Wang VS operator with a brand-new CNE.
We started with a mixed bag of PS/2 30's & 50's (if memory serves me correctly); these were Microchannel-based. We also had a room full of PS/2 25's (ISA). There was a separate block of Macs.
When we started there was no network, just a mass of PC's & Macs. The PC's had been donated by a bank, and the Microchannel machines still had 10BASE2 cards inside.
I managed to get a donated copy of NetWare 3.12 for the school.
Our server was an old Dell 486DX with a 325MB HD & 4MB RAM (later upgraded to 8MB).
Inside of a year we had about fifty PC's on a coax LAN (bad when the kids swung their feet and kicked the cables loose, but those were the cards we had).
We had accounts for over 200 kids. We used NetWare menus, DOS 6.22 menus, freebee virus scanners, old apps, and hashed-together printer set-ups.
Later we found that the PS/2 25's had some oddball IBM card inside (IBM Baseband, 2.4 - 2.5 Mbps). Luckily NetWare had drivers for this - so this put us up to about seventy clients.
The teacher who ran the computers went from initial resistance to the LAN, to making his own coax cables from a 1000' foot spool and a box of BNC connectors. He bought tranceivers networked the Macs on his own.
When I finally left the project we were starting to experiment with the connection recovery features of Client32. We were looking at setting up a small web server for internal use, and maybe connecting the Macs.
I learned a number of important things from this: Everything ends up kludged. Perhaps this was just my mind-set after a while, but I see it elsewhere. Whatever project you dream up will take you anywhere from two to five times as long as you initially estimate (usually the latter).
These came second-hand from the teacher: Kids have great skills at learning the supervisor password. Co-opt the potential hackers,
I think that this was one of the most grueling projects that I have ever worked on. It was damned frustraing to come from a business environment where we had PC's that were at least fairly new, to a learning environment where kids had to work with leftovers.
As regards system costs - in the shop where I work we have a mixed bag. I have Netware, NT, Red Hat, Mac O/S 8, and even an AS/400. The most stable systems are the NetWare server, the Linux mail server & the AS/400. The NT servers & clients require less work to set up, but the stability is correspondingly less. The Mac server is perhaps a little less stable. I'd trade off setup & configuration time for increased stability any day.
I think that you will encounter high maintenance on any system placed in an environment where the user-base fluctuates on a daily basis. Multiple users at any PC cause more incidents. Kids are also less afraid than adults, and will try things - causing more work for IT staff.
In retrospect I would say that anything was better than nothing. I am forty-three, and spent junior & senior high years in a small town in the South (Arkansas). I remember being envious when I met kids in college that had lived in a town with computers & Calculus courses in high school (Oak Ridge, TN - figures).
It might be nice to see kids with the latest easy-to-maintain systems. But this won't happen. One - it's not reality, two - they won't learn if they don't encounter problems.
The business world that they enter will also be messy, and they will benefit if they have experience in trouble-shooting, even if it's in figuring out where their file went, or why the printed output is botched.
It also may make them a little hungry. I think that that is why Linux is succeeding - the people that use it and the people that maintain it are a little hungry. They have a fever that won't go away.
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From Spring 1995 through Mid 1997 I volunteered at The Computer School in New York City. This is one of the mini-schools in the old IS44 building. It's a selective public middle-school. Kids are interviewed, and they choose for a broad spectrum of kids. The Computer School served as the computer lab to the other mini-schools in the building.
I came in one or two Sundays a month, more if necessary, less if I was lucky. At the beginning of the project I was a former (laid-off) Wang VS operator with a brand-new CNE.
We started with a mixed bag of PS/2 30's & 50's (if memory serves me correctly); these were Microchannel-based. We also had a room full of PS/2 25's (ISA). There was a separate block of Macs.
When we started there was no network, just a mass of PC's & Macs. The PC's had been donated by a bank, and the Microchannel machines still had 10BASE2 cards inside.
I managed to get a donated copy of NetWare 3.12 for the school.
Our server was an old Dell 486DX with a 325MB HD & 4MB RAM (later upgraded to 8MB).
Inside of a year we had about fifty PC's on a coax LAN (bad when the kids swung their feet and kicked the cables loose, but those were the cards we had).
We had accounts for over 200 kids. We used NetWare menus, DOS 6.22 menus, freebee virus scanners, old apps, and hashed-together printer set-ups.
Later we found that the PS/2 25's had some oddball IBM card inside (IBM Baseband, 2.4 - 2.5 Mbps). Luckily NetWare had drivers for this - so this put us up to about seventy clients.
The teacher who ran the computers went from initial resistance to the LAN, to making his own coax cables from a 1000' foot spool and a box of BNC connectors. He bought tranceivers networked the Macs on his own.
When I finally left the project we were starting to experiment with the connection recovery features of Client32. We were looking at setting up a small web server for internal use, and maybe connecting the Macs.
I learned a number of important things from this:
Everything ends up kludged. Perhaps this was just my mind-set after a while, but I see it elsewhere.
Whatever project you dream up will take you anywhere from two to five times as long as you initially estimate (usually the latter).
These came second-hand from the teacher:
Kids have great skills at learning the supervisor password.
Co-opt the potential hackers,
I think that this was one of the most grueling projects that I have ever worked on. It was damned frustraing to come from a business environment where we had PC's that were at least fairly new, to a learning environment where kids had to work with leftovers.
As regards system costs - in the shop where I work we have a mixed bag. I have Netware, NT, Red Hat, Mac O/S 8, and even an AS/400. The most stable systems are the NetWare server, the Linux mail server & the AS/400. The NT servers & clients require less work to set up, but the stability is correspondingly less. The Mac server is perhaps a little less stable. I'd trade off setup & configuration time for increased stability any day.
I think that you will encounter high maintenance on any system placed in an environment where the user-base fluctuates on a daily basis. Multiple users at any PC cause more incidents. Kids are also less afraid than adults, and will try things - causing more work for IT staff.
In retrospect I would say that anything was better than nothing. I am forty-three, and spent junior & senior high years in a small town in the South (Arkansas). I remember being envious when I met kids in college that had lived in a town with computers & Calculus courses in high school (Oak Ridge, TN - figures).
It might be nice to see kids with the latest easy-to-maintain systems. But this won't happen. One - it's not reality, two - they won't learn if they don't encounter problems.
The business world that they enter will also be messy, and they will benefit if they have experience in trouble-shooting, even if it's in figuring out where their file went, or why the printed output is botched.
It also may make them a little hungry. I think that that is why Linux is succeeding - the people that use it and the people that maintain it are a little hungry. They have a fever that won't go away.