(Message inbox:48)
Return-Path: <lerman@mit-heracles>
Received: from mit-heracles (mit-heracles.ARPA) by mit-charon (4.12/4.7)
	id AA20300; Wed, 24 Oct 84 08:35:43 edt
Received: by mit-heracles (4.12/4.7)
	id AA17357; Wed, 24 Oct 84 08:39:57 edt
From: lerman@mit-heracles (Steve Lerman)
Message-Id: <8410241239.AA17357@mit-heracles>
Date: 24 Oct 1984 0839-EDT (Wednesday)
To: jim@mit-heracles, jon@charon, hconsult@heracles, paul@heracles,
        treese@apollo, meltsner@charon
Cc: wcs@charon, rdz@charon, cec@mit-heracles, mory@mit-heracles
Fcc: problems
Subject: Comments on Athena

	In my last note in response to your series of concerns, I stated
that I would followup with some further details of the actions I was
going to take. The internal staff issues were being dealt with while
your letter was sent. It would be difficult to have a reasonable
discussion about them via mail, but I would be please to talk with you
about them personally.

	Your comment that Athena should make concrete moves toward more
general student accessibility was important. I decided that we will use
the student center cluster as primarily a student open work area.,
making most if not all the computational resources there now open for
student use. This will expand our current population of student user
from about 750 now (about 700 students in courses and about 50 student
employees of Athena) by another about 1700. If enough students are
interested, I am willing to devote all the DEC facilities in the Student
Center for this this purpose. The question of IBM facilities is still
open, but it will be a while before we have any IBM workstations in the
student center anyway.

	Cecilia and I are still working out the details of a plan for
doing this. We have to deal with account generation, how to set
priorities for uses, how to move the current users now in courses there,
how to fix the registration program, etc. I will keep you informed as
the plan unfolds. One of the questions that was raised is whether there
are some students who want to help with this idea. We could use help
with some of the programming and some of the logistics. I broached this
idea to some of the SIPB people and got a lukewarm response, but at that
time it was more of a vague concept than a concrete committment by me.
Some of the work has to begin now, and much of it has to be done during
IAP. Any takers out there????


					Steve Lerman