Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 8 December, 1980 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by William M. York. In attendance were WMY, Alan, c|, CAH, Jay, Naha, DCP, GMP, BIM, JIS, GCO, ACW, RDM (asleep), RK. Late were: DLW, LSP, JMB, David Kushner, PAE, RLL, Barmar. The minutes of the meeting of 1 December, 1980 were read and accepted as corrected. We were introduced to Evan Williams, who may be interested in becoming a member. Treasurer's Report: Total spending this month to date is $3721.75, of which $967 is disk charge. Someone has been calling Rochester, NY, on the office phone for one minute. DLW and Lee Parks, former member, came in during the Treasurer's Report. Chairman's Report: The Chairman went up to talk to Wes about the hardware budget last week and was told that Corbato is going to be coming on Tuesday (tomorrow) and they might as well all talk about it then. DLW went to the second of Corbato's network meetings. People seem to be still debating possibilities. With what evolving standards should it be compatible? How will people pay for using it? What will the timetable for implementation be? What specifications must people meet before getting onto the net? What basic services will be offered? The CCE met again and our Chairman was there. Nick Negroponte had to leave early so they let him talk first. He talked about the current situation at the ArqMac. He was concerned that networks carry both digital and video information. A lot of this is looking forward to the way the new Media Wonderland Building will be equipped. Jeff Broughton, former member, came in, ran out, and was dragged back in at this point. User Interrupt: Keith Rowan, a graduate in course 4, wants a Coop account for editing his thesis. We told him the rates, then gave him a Coop account, amount to be negotiated later. More Chairman's Report: Corbato wants a master plan for networking by the end of the year, with most of the major philosophical issues at least provisionally solved. Problems remaining include: how will we interface to other networks? How will off-campus living groups communicate with campus computers? Hulsizer mumbled about every student having a personal computer by 1985, but it was just mumbling. Hulsizer then played devil's advocate for a while, not seeing exactly what use a campus network would be. It helped people realize that they had not only planning, but convincing, to do. The next meeting of the CCE will be Thursday afternoon, and they will discuss word processing. David Kushner, a person interested in becoming a member, came in during the Chairman's report. Office Report: The office is a sty. In the refrigerator WMY found a chinese-food container full of green fuzzy rice. It was thrown away before it could take over the world. Computer Services: ACW visited JCF and found out that the rumored application form does not exist as such -- it is really an application for an account if you already have money. The structure of the quality printing tools was discussed. Registered ECS users should be able to turn off the 7-second loop detector. New_user was changed to create the user's directory. This is wrong: what we really want to do is keep track of who does what with new_user. New_user will be changed back. Members who take applications should remember to ask new users whether they want to keep their work private. If they do, check null_access on the application. Occasionally people on large mailing lists receive mail full of nulls. The quality printing daemon has been wedging unexpectedly. The next time this happens, call GMP at any time of day or night. We discussed the acls on the daily, the fear being that anybody on the SIPB_admin project could plant a Trojan horse in the daily. It was decided that the risk is not great, so we will leave the status quo the way it is. There have been fairly extensive paper thefts from the Student Center Terminal Room. One such theft was actually witnessed. There was a general discussion of the security of the SCTR. We decided that we should put up signs there telling our users to watch for this kind of thing happening and to try and stop it. We are assuming that it is not our users who are pilfering, but rather randoms who just need scrap paper. Although we are unsure of whether the guard there is really guarding our stuff, the present situation is probably accptable; at least, we have not lost anything yet. We should also find out what kind of theft insurance MIT has. If a non-Student user wants to use our tools, tell him to add a link to >udd>Student>searched to his search rules. Telecommunications Report: We need to order a dataset for Baker ASAP. Terminal letters are coming in from dormitories. A few are interested in getting video terminals. It was suggested that we revamp the Spinwriter configuration. Perhaps there should be a cheap video control terminal to type commands on. Also the Spinwriter makes a lot of noise. For now this is just breeze but we will think about it. The office Teleray is a public terminal. Users have priority over SIPB members on this terminal. Soley caught a guy in MacGregor connecting the dataset to the dormline so that he could dial Wellesley DTSS. This illustrates the need to upgrade our datasets to be able to access tie lines. This costs about thirty per cent more than the class E phones we have now, which are barely allowed to dial anything. The middle Teleray was losing characters and was called in. It seems that this is an endemic problem with Telerays and there is not likely to be anything that can be done about it. Space still doesn't erase on the SCTR ADM 3A. Perhaps this is because a switch inside is mis-set. We will look into this. PAE came in during the Telecommunications Report. Publications Report: It was suggested that we stop waiting for Spencer to finish the Emacs handout and hack it ourselves. Let's. A user lost big by being too paranoid and saving his file too frequently -- he deleted a big chuck accidentally and lost a lot of work. Maybe ^X^S should check to see that the file is not shrinking too much. PAE hacked up a master for the gold card on Camex equipment while he was in Dallas. We may have a NETS fault. We got a bunch of Lisp Notes. We had better hurry with a Tops-20 version for the IAP Lisp course. IAP Report: The IAP office lost big. Both Jay's and Jeannette Hyde's corrections to the preliminary IAP guide's descriptions of the Center's IAP courses were not included in the Final Guide. The Lisp Poster needs to be updated, and we have to do some publicity work on our other two courses. The IAP project is in good shape. New_user IAP works. It has the alias "iap". We have a microphone for the Lisp Course. RLL came in during the IAP report. Other: The ASA is having a Spring Midway. They don't know when, but we got our form in on time. Applications: Eric Sklar wants a Coop account to do his thesis for course 8. Given. Jacob Richter wants an unknown amount to learn Pascal and other languages. Taken to meeting because he is a Wellesley high school student. He has no connection to MIT other than possibly having applied for admission. Rejected, for that reason. Gary Oberbrunner wants $100 for general hacking. Given. Total appropriations: $3155 without Coop Autoed: $3055 Student: $2905 370: $150 To Meeting: $100, all Student. Coop: None. Barmar came in during the applications. Other Other: Harlan Ellison will lecture at MIT this January 29. BIM is working on a way to reconnect to a disconnected process over the ARPAnet. The Dudley bus has been cut to once every half hour after 10:00 p.m. So has the Arlington Heights bus. The Camex installation at Dallas was failing due to a drowned connector. An expedition went to the new Mandarin Restaurant in Central Square, and liked what they found there. The meeting was adjourned at 22:10. Minutes taken and submitted by Allan C. Wechsler ;; Local Modes: ;; Mode:TEXT ;; LISP ) Hack:1 ;; Auto Fill Mode: ;; Fill Column:70 ;; Fill Prefix: ;; END: