Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 8/18/80

	The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by Richard L. Lawhorn.
		
	In attendance were GMP, RLL, RDM, ZRM, JSL, and Jean Bonney.
			
	Late were: WMY, Alan, ACW, J9, RK, HGA, c|.

	The minutes of the meeting of 8/11/80 were read and accepted as
		corrected.  ACW, J9, WMY, Alan, RK, HGA, and c| came in
		at the end of the minutes.

	*** USER INTERRUPT ***
	*
	*	The Daily Confusion, represented by Jeffrey Solof and
	*	Neal Lippman, want $200 for the production of their
	*	R/O week newsletter.  Move to give $150.  Given.
	*
	*** TPURRETNI RESU ***

	Treasurer's Report:

		This month's spending to date is $4416.32.

		Our spending is still largely for storage.  The
		chairman cleaned up a lot of mailboxes, some of which
		contained a lot of marginal things.

		Among the marginal things were Vinciguerra.Student's
		thesis, mailed from the ORION project to Student.
		This happened in May, and since then Vinciguerra has
		been deleted from the Student project and the ORION
		project has ceased to exist.  We generated a Warning
		form for him anyway.

	Chairman's Report:

		The Chairman has written a rough draft for our
		hardware proposal, which will be discussed under
		Telecommunications.

		The Gray letter has not yet been sent.

	Office Report:
	
		Penny is garbage-collecting the bins, as threatened a
		few weeks ago.

		Three new chairs were purchased.  They work.

		The Spinwriter had its 20,000 mile checkup.

	Computer Services:

		A cleanup has not yet been done on the Student
		project.  It ought to be, as soon as possible.

		No cleanup has been done on ECS on Coop either, nor
		have obsolete users been purged.  Perhaps the Coop
		users should all be called to see if they are still
		using their accounts.

		Should we establish limits to the length of people's
		requests to the Student Center printer?  Only if we
		can warn users that their request will be deferred at
		the time they issue the request.  Gary Palter will
		research this.

		Many of the commands in the SIPB library are suffering
		from software rot.  nlinks and nbranches do not take
		pathnames as arguments, just entrynames.  This should
		be fixed.

		People who want to use Pascal on Multics should be
		sent to Peter Kelley.

		It would be possible to have a free terminal display
		on the graphics terminal.

	Telecommunications:

		The minutes of the special telecommunications meeting
		were read.

		Shortly after the minutes were mailed out Wednesday
		night, CBF started dispatching a series of notes
		describing difficulties he foresaw.

		Some of these difficulties involved the compatibility
		of the specific hardware in question.

		The 11/05 in question is an old workhorse from the
		math department, traded to Kulp for a chaosnet
		interface.  Kulp lent it to Noel Chiappa who used it
		successfully.  All the memory in it works, although
		it is of various flavors.  The backplane was modified
		by DEC to accommodate the existing DZ-11: it can
		probably be modified again.

		The math department has an expander box for the 11
		that we could probably get.

		The chaosnet interface is a bulky quad board that
		could be fit into the last slot of the backplane.

		It was moved to endorse the proposal of the
		telecommunications meeting.  Passes.  RLL will be
		responsible for a feasibility study, to make sure that
		it really can all be done.

	R/O Report:

		The secretary had better get on the stick concerning
		the tour.

		The chairman does not yet know if he will be speaking
		at the R/O computer orientation.

	Other:

		The pocket guide is out.  We don't know if any have
		been ordered.

		The MPM Introduction is out.  That should be ordered
		too.

		There will be yet another manual called "Programmers'
		Introduction to Multics".

	Applications:

		Shahjahan Mahmood wants $100 to use CMS.  Given.

		SCEP was given $100 on each of SCEP and SCEP1 for a
		total of $200 by EC vote.

		Michael Good wants $100 to continue maintaining a
		music data base for the MIT Concert Band.  Given.

		Total appropriations: $1293.32 without Coop
		  Autoed: $743.32
		    Student: $593.32
		    370: $150
		  To Meeting: $350
		    Student: $250
		    370: $100
		  EC Vote: $200

	Other Other:

		ZRM is trying to organize a party for next weekend.

		A really obscure bug in tape_archive was discovered.
		Multices within 259 nautical miles of the
		International Date Line, or in the same time zone as
		the South Magnetic Pole during the second fortnight on
		or after the third Sunday after the second full moon
		immediately following Easter Sunday cannot do tape
		restores until the exponentiation operator is called
		four times in succession with a negative exponent.
		The error code is error_table_$bad: Bad badness.

		Olin Sibert has begun work at CISL.  He lost regarding
		the programmer's release clause.

		The Spinwriter was mentioned in an article in Isaac
		Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.

	The meeting was adjourned at 22:10.
 
 
		     Minutes taken and submitted by Allan C. Wechsler
 
 

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