SIX MONTHS OF EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVE MEETING MINUTES - SELECTED EXCERPTS

(thanks to Beth Kevles and Carla Fermann)

5/18/90

Microcomputer Center will sell workstations [at a discount]. By July they'll have Vaxstation3100's and DECstation3100's, and PS/2 if they're ready. Next year sometime they'll have MacIIci's.
Anne, Dot, and Bill attended a demo of the Barco projection system to replace the Hughs Lightvalve.
The EI group will be taking Dave Flanagan out to dinner next week. His last day is Thursday.
Dave Flanagan says that FMAX (new program to replace xmath) is coming along.
Craig is designing a server for a calendar program, and has looked at something called adt for creating an Athena menu.

Anne is searching for a plan for an electronic classroom. 1-115 is a possibility.
Anne says the extended MOTD proposal should be ready by June 25.
Paul Boutin is working on an extended annotation facility for EZ, so that a professor could make comments IN your EZ paper. It sounds kind of cool.
Michele Berrie is evaluating something called Maple.

There was some discussion of the "xcluster" program... There was some discussion of where to run it - at a dedicated workstation, on the printservers with screen and w/o keyboard, or to let people ask their friends to find them a free workstation.
There was also discussion of some sort of potential xmap program, which would help freshmen to navigate through MIT.
The faculty liaisons are now getting somewhat flooded with Motif questions.
EI isn't moving to C++.

Bruce will be doing some work on S, which is a matlab-like package, but oriented towards statistics.
OLH has multi-viewers working now, and Chris hopes to have history and bookmarking working before he leaves for his vacation.
Bruce says the turnin server survived the big banging session, and is ready for prime time.
Anne presented a talk on Athena in Barcelona.

Anne is pleased to announce that 3.091 will be using OLTA this Fall.
Paul gave a talk about ADT, the Athena Desk Top that he and Craig have been working on. Although it's still called a "desktop", it's looking less and less like a desktop; it's now more of a windowmanager-independent combination menu system, session manager, and desktop accessory. It's got a clock, xload, and logout button. Across the top of the screen, it's got menus that would make sense to someone new to UNIX. Within each menu are the programs available in that area (for example Editing has emacs, vi, ez, etc). By moving your cursor to the right of any entry, you can get information about the entry.
John is working on an information program based on xcluster. It will display the map and have a menu bar with different topics, such as libraries, buildings, offices, food services, housing, student center, athletic facilities, emergencies. By selecting the desired entry, you can get information (such as room number and phone number) and have the location indicated on the map.

The Software Matrix - The EI group is helping out User Services by providing ideas on how the information in the Software Matrix might be reorganized...
Vanilla Workstations for EI - Once the construction is done, EI will be getting one of each type of workstation in a carrel outside of Bill's office. These machines can be used by EI for demoing software, testing software, or building software.
Turnin has added new command line procedures (return paper to student, collect papers, etc.)
Craig still has about 2 weeks of work on the calendar program. He's working on a new interface.

EDUCOM is in Atlanta the week of October 15. Naomi, Anne, and Dot will start looking at courseware and deciding which applications to demo. Once they've made their selections, they'll prepare scripts to accompany the demos, and then train other people in how to demo the applications. We'd also like to take an RS/6000 running as much Athena software as possible.
The Micro Center will start selling Athena-able workstations (pmax and pvax) on Sept 12. For now, the Athena software will only be put on workstations purchased with requisitions, for either faculty use or for department clusters.
Steve Ellis will be building ProChart for the PS/2 next week.
The Motif version of OLH is now ready for the Vax and RT.
Locker Turnoff - Anne reports that about 40 courses have responded so far. She expects next week to be the big week for people to notice that their lockers have been turned off.

Release Team - Anne reports that the lack of structure to the planning of the 7.1 released made it difficult to document. The 7.2 release should be better.
VOSAP - Peter Roden has been working on writing up a System Architecture, as was requested at the VOSAP (Vendor Operating Systems and Platforms) meeting.
The Future of Athena - Ron, Earll, Dean McVicar, and others have been meeting to discuss scenarios for various levels of funding. Recommendations will be made to the Academic Council and the Faculty. It is expected that plans for the future of Athena will be in place by December.

Naomi showed screendumps of ADT at the Directors Meeting, and it made a big hit. George Champine was especially impressed.
It's not obvious how you use footnotes in EZ.
Michele reports that coming soon are Maple, S+, and a version of LISP.

Anne attended the 7.2 Release meeting. Items discussed were:
- putting ADT in the release
- putting turnin/pickup on the packs
- bug fixes to mwm
- Chris will speak with Exra and formulate a proposal to redesign the login process
Anne reports that OLTA is going quite well. 1.00 isusing it a lot. There isn't super heavy usage from 3.091 yet.

PS/2 Status - 10 machines will be deployed to Nuclear Engineering Faculty on Monday, but they won't have software yet.

Naomi - Design Team update - We hope to have a new org chart ready by themiddle of December. By the end of December, we hope to be able to let individuals know where they'll fit.
FMAX - We should start putting more time into fmax, since we know that there's a large group of people who'd be using it.
Anne - We will be contacting Faculty and TAs about listing course software in ADT.
** ADT needs a new name! ** Since ADT is already trademarked by someone else, our adt needs a new name. If you've got suggestions, please pot them in the adt discuss meeting.