Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 08/28/89


	The meeting was called to order at 1930 by amgreene.
	
	In attendance were 
		Voting members: amdehon amgreene jh jcbourne qjb marc kerr
				dkk(late)
		Associate members: jtkohl ambar srz wesommer
		Non-voting members: 
		Prospectives: kevles lnp
		Guests: Rock Fu

	Treasurer's Report:
Treasurer is not here.  We still haven't seen treasurer and chair in
the same room.  Or sending mail with the same timestamp.  Or something.

	CokeComm Report:
Coke is dwindling.  No diet coke.  Order will go in tomorrow.

We now have boxes for non-deposit cans.

	Chairman's Report:
Chairman is back from France.  It's 1:30 chairman time, so chairman is
not here.  Did he already have a meeting by himself?

	Office Report:
Pit ** 2.  Major Pit.  We ought to have the office clean for R/O.
Arguments about misrepresentation.  Maybe we should finish moving in
There is a difference between messy and a pit.  Is there a pitness
scale?  Is it logarithmic?  Will the office manager return?  These
questions and more...

	Athena Report:
6.3B is released.  Thousands die.  Eskimos invade the kernel.  People
who don't notice the change are either blind or dead.  Dot files on
afs were not changed.

	Computer Services:
Chairman broke Charon and then left for France.  Lots of flamage on
sipb-afsreq, mostly from Simson.  Chairman will hopefully fix things
soon.

Call from Jim Rees about teturner from Student cable.  Marc knows
something.  teturner called about videotapes, do we want to do
videotapes about services?  When his acct was scheduled for
termination, he invoked our name.  His call might have been a
last-minute effort to get his acct saved.  He's a night person at ESG.
No connection with any SIPB project.

Dialup(s) should be updated sometime soon.  John Carr (jfc) wants to
do some hacking.  We'll let him...

Snork is still running 6.2.  Ambar is a black-hole for email.

Cray billing started today.  How fast does MetaFont run on a Cray?

	Andrew's TUG Report:

Amgreene said he went to the "Scribe convention".  Oops.  Really TUG.
Knuth announced that TeX is frozen in its current state.  Then he said
it was thawed out.  8-bit input.  \errorcontext variable which will
suppress some error messages.  \language is a reserved word.  Lamport
talked about the future of LaTeX.  LaTeX will be redesigned and
reimplemented as a general mark-up language.  Some things will not
work.  Won't be stable.  Making it flexible, user-friendly, etc.

Lamport is actually a reasonable person in person.  Amgreene is
getting more respect for him.

CMR looks crappy at 300dpi because it's a modern font.  It's either
thick, or thin.  Knuth designed it at 600dpi.  It's monotype 8-a.
(same as ACP).  Volume IV of ACP is promised in 1991.

New font family -- Pandora.  Amgreene will make it, and install it in
the SIPB locker.

People are switching over to PostScript fonts.

Andrew has the program from the conference.  Debby thought his talk
went well.  We have old versions of TeX & LaTeX.

	Telecommunications Report:
No communications.

	Publications Report:
We're out of Inessential LaTeX.  Inessential Guide's moved to the
"Lisp Notes" pile.  Work should be done on new Inessential Guide.
Robby needs to redeem himself.  Maybe Andrew will punt this time.  Is
this mail fraud?

One pager on AFS would be nice.

	R/O Report:
R/O is far, far, away.  Uh, wait a minute.  August 28th is R/O
planning day.

Terminals for R/O center.  They'll be in the West Lounge, and should
be back in a week.

Tour:  dkk is not here.  Debby has a list of ideas and contact in Tech
Square.  Who wants to watch dkk?  Who wants to watch the person
watching dkk?  Where's the ball?  Who's on the ball?  Debby is
volunteered to talk to Dave.

Dave walks in.  Things have been rather busy the past week at Athena.

Midway:  What should we bring down?  NeXT machine, and what else?
Snork doesn't have an Athens drive.  Midway is on the Tuesday, 5th.
Start thinking about it. 

Clearinghouse is having lots of "fun".  If we called it anything else,
we couldn't describe it in mixed case.  What does F.U.N. really stand
for?  Installing an Athena cluster with broken hardware is something
everybody should avoid at all costs.  There are easier ways to rewind
TK50's than by moving the drive into another machine.  Clearinghouse
is going at a good pace.

	IAP Report:
().  IAP is eclipsed by R/O.

	Other:
Clock sentenced to be hanged at high noon.

More voting members than non-voting members for a long time.

Secretary still hasn't taken minutes in the AFS cell.

	Other Other:
Gesundheit Stan.

Followup on last week's Neptune report:  The most interesting object
in the solar system is Triton.  Still left as mysteries are Pluto and
its moon Charon.  Lots of blatantly false info during the TV coverage.
Somebody from JPL is talking noon on Friday.  54-427.

	The meeting was adjourned at 2012.


	Minutes taken and submitted by srz.