Minutes of the SIPB meeting of 5 January, 1981 The meeting was called to order at 19:50 by William M. York In attendance were WMY, Naha, JSL, Barmar, BIM, ACW, CAH, WOS, Dave Kushner, Evan Williams, GMP, c|, NML, DPC, and TZS. The minutes of the previous meeting were not available due to Tech Square being down in flames. The minutes of the meeting of December 15 were read, for some reason. RK, RLL, and Steve LeBlanc came in during the minutes. Treasurer's Report: Total December spending was $11,704.64, bringing our total spending this year to $55,903.20. January spending to date is $1,034.34, of which $633 is for storage. At the end of this wweek there will be a cleanup of files that have not been touched since 1 December 1980. IAP spending last year was $7,129 without Center courses. This will be a lot less this year because the Lisp course is on EECS. Chairman's Report: At the meeting of the CCE today they talked about word processing and research computing, and also a little about student access to computer services. They decided to recommend that there be a study group devoted explicitly to word processing. They talked a little about how to stem the trend of people going every which way and buying seventeen million different kinds of word processors. Multics was mentioned as a viable alternative. Moses leaned toward a 20 devoted to word processing, but the rest persuaded him that this was exactly the kind of commitment they were trying to postpone with an interim solution. Corbato, Burner, Hulsizer and York will prepare a report for the next meeting. They seem to think that the average word processor on campus receives only 4 hours of use per day. This makes it hard to defend all this extra hardware. But trends are still happening: if we can satisfy people on the verge of buying thir own equipment, by putting them on Multics, usage will increase drastically. Wes weakly objected to using Multics as the factotum word processor, apparently on the old ground of emacs overloading it and so on. The working committee on word processing is Corbato, Bob Loscher, Jim Culletin, and Bill York, with others to be gathered from the rest of the institute. The overall prospects seem good for Multics. There was some talk about research computing, i.e., number crunching. They rejected the idea of an array processor, because it cannot be multiplexed among many number-crunching time-sharing users. They talked some about getting a Cray: after all, a lot of these people are buying Cray time with DOE funds, and perhaps they could cooperatively get funding from DOE to get a Cray for the Institute. They talked about student access to computing facilities. Hulsizer thought it was rotten that he could not assign occasional homework requiring computer usage. Loscher complained that JCF was serving only the research community, not the academic courses. There was a brief mention that under the Dertouzos plan there were supposed to be six JCF-like centers. York gave a little SIPB spiel, mentioning our lack of ability to fund theses. The meeting ended around then, but York continued to talk to Hulsizer, explaining that one good way to increase student access would be to increase the SIPB's funding substantially. RMF came in at this point, as did Ed Schwalenberg. Both were introduced. Office Report: It was moved to buy the office a doormat. Seriously, folks, try not to track too much mud and snow into the office. There is a new Blackboard Rejects file. It lives in Administrative Archives. This is where things go when they are removed from the blackboard and bulletin boards. Our old keyboard will probably work with the new Plasma hardware. Penny is going to redo the address and phone list. Please check the address list to make sure that your address is current. There are programming contest rules. Included in them are entry forms, which when taken should be filed in a file marked "Programming contest" in the applications drawer. If you take a form B from an entrant, do not put it in JJS's bin. Staple it to the entry form, and file it with. Prepare for The Office Game. The tiles over the loft were fixed. Computer Services: CAH Was productive over the vacation, hacking dover utilities for Multics, and brought up a Multics finger server. Peter Kelley gave SIPB access sufficient to move requests from queue to queue. This is also sufficient to do real damage: we should be responsible. No: we wiLl ask Peter to take the access away. Penny talked to a Physics instructor who wants to send lots of UROP students to us. Penny was hospitable until it developed that an unknown proportion of these UROPs would turn into theses. When she said discouraging things about theses, he got mad and left. We could decide on the basis of whether the student is actually registered for thesis credit. It was so moved, explicitly. And passed. We will work on TEACHEMACS for Multics. There was discussion of reworking the SIPBTEXT interface. Menu driven software, etc. Telecommunications: The old horizontal registration problem for the Spinwriter still is plaguing us, even though it was supposedly fixed. We will call it in again. The 4800 baud Telerays go into a character-dropping failure mode. We should get one to fail and call S&S. The VT100 randomly uppercases characters, but very unrepeatably. Someone was using the Spinwriter as a terminal on Multics, and it was stopping every 60 lines. This was because it was logged in as ttp NEC5520, not NEC5520_10c6l as it should be. The LA 120 was losing because it was not sensing paper out. The office dataset is not working. One of the wire pairs running to the Student Center is broken. The problem will be referred to dormline. RK called in the dataset. When they come in tomorrow we must get the circuit number from them. Publications: The NUMS contain some misinformation about dialup procedure. Steve will work on them. We have been charging $2 for Lisp Course Lisp Notes. The price for the old Lisp Notes was $3. We will charge $2 for all of them. IAP Report: Ann White mistakenly believes that we are involved in her FORTRAN course. The school of engineering is funding it. We have nothing to do with her FORTRAN course except that her losers keep blundering in. We should blunder them out again. This morning there was no Lisp Course publicity anywhere in the Institute. ACW consed up a poster, got a hundred copies made and put a few up. There was a good turnout for the Lisp Course. Maybe 125-150 people. We are doing a text processing mini-course (the first of three identical sessions) tomorrow night. There were some complaints about Bernie's teaching style. Tomorrow DLW will start teaching the Multics course. His major problem is transportation. His car is frotzed. The course will be at 3:00, and will be about the Multics programming environment, dynamic linking, etc. Other: The IPS computer tour people have been saying all kinds of random things about us to their tourists. HGA is having his wisdom teeth removed in Missouri. Lamson is getting perilously close to being nominated for membership. The ninth floor is in really bad shape, what with air conditioning problems and AI having its memory gutted. Dave Kushner was nominated for membership in this september board. His election will be next week. We got an order for a Lisp Notes from Brazil. Applications: Steve Cooper was given SIPB's sluch CMS account to do some trivial assembler hackery. John C. Mallory got $200 by EC vote for doing a paper for a course he took from Minsky, and write some Lisp programs related thereto. Total appropriation: $1220 Autoed: $1020 EC vote: $200, all Student. Other Other: Expedition Friday night, perhaps, to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. New Years Celebration at Hsing Hsing next Monday. Sign up by Wednesday. There will be a Toronto expedition around the end of January. The office has Harvard Square Theatre schedules. Take one. DCP and Alan completely disassembled a Rubik's Cube... nearly to component elementary particles. DCP is seriously considering trying to make an order 5 cube. Nationwide demand for cubes is staggering. Don't bend the new polyhedron toy. Contribute to Heavy Metal subscription. Spencer has a snazzy Multics T-shirt. Wechsler was phone-hacked: four hackers left the office and phoned simultaneously. RDM is collecting slightly damaged but usable tape cases. Beth Lampron is looking for a flute teacher. RLL is selling an 11/34 for about $11K. New office toy made of plastic brought by Earnhardt. Meeting adjourned at 22:20 into discussion of Toronto trip. Somebody please drive secretary home, he is moby toasty. Minutes taken given submitted injected tranformed and hacked by me Wechsler.