From: Dale R. Worley <drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 94 21:56:04 EST
Message-Id: <9401200256.AA14700@jordan>
To: espeople@MIT.EDU
Subject: Second begging blurb: workstation needed for loan for good cause

I am working on setting up the computer system for a world-affairs
simulation (Crisis 1994) for high-school students that will be held on
Feb 12 and 13, 1994 in Cambridge (Boston), MA.

This time around, I'm looking for a workstation for the Crisis
program.  What we need is a stand-alone BSD-ish Unix workstation that
we can borrow for about two weeks, or at least, two weekends.  We
actually can rent one (unlike terminal servers), but they're expensive
(nearly $1,000) and the budget really can't take it.

If anybody has one that we could use, it would make Crisis enormously
easier to produce.  A detailed discription of the Crisis simulation
and the equipment situation follows.

Thanks,

Dale
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dear Friends,

For the last five years, the Educational Studies Program has sponsored
CRISIS, a two-day political-military-economic simulation of world
affairs, for high school students from eastern Massachusetts.  CRISIS
has been very popular, with participation doubling each year.  It has
grown so popular, that now we need your help.

One of the recurring problems has been getting messages between
participants, both between teams and between teams and Control.  For
CRISIS, 1993, we recruited about twenty people to sit in an Athena
cluster madly typing whatever came in so that we could print a
"newsletter" each game week (about every thirty minutes) to keep all
participants informed of what was going on.  The people who helped
worked tirelessly, and feverishly, but we learned to our regret that the
thirty minute delay caused by collecting material made the newsletter
too slow to be of much use.  We resolved to find a better way for 1994.

The answer that comes easily to people from MIT is to set up a computer
network.  Dale Worley has taken charge of that, and worked out the basic
requirements of the system.  We will try to hook up about forty VT-100
terminals, one for each team, to a central server through four
eight-port servers.  Dale has also been pricing this out, and found that
the minimum rentals for the the five key pieces is about five times what
we can afford.  And so we are turning to our contacts out in the real
world. 

Might you have, or through your employer have access to, any of these
pieces of hardware?  CRISIS, 1994, is scheduled for the weekend of
February 12-13 in building E51, but we would like to borrow these things
starting in mid-January so we can assemble the network and be certain it
works.  Alternative ideas for system design would also be welcome.

If you can help us in any way, please contact Dale Worley at
drw@math.mit.edu. 

Thanks for whatever you can do.


PS: Recipients of this message are welcome to attend CRISIS.  Who knows,
you may find yourself receiving an assignment and becoming part of the
game!