🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2992@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>Consider the analogies between transportation and computation
>technologies.

Good analogy.  However....

>But how many people prefer to drive an automobile instead of taking
>mass transit?

What do you think the answer would be if the automobile owner had to put
the car together himself, had to maintain it himself, and had to maintain
his own roads.  That's the situation in an anarchic workstation environment
-- every user for himself.  With a centralized organization, there are
people responsible for configuring systems, maintaining them, and
maintaining the shared resources such as networks, modems, and printers.

At our company we have nearly 200 Suns (about a dozen of which are file
and/or compute servers) and about a half-dozen Vaxes (a 785, an 8800, and
some 83xx and 6xxx).  Back in the pre-Sun days, when we had one or two
Vaxes that everyone used we developed lots of local software.  As we've
moved into the workstation environment the users still expect to find that
same environment.

At first we were using the anarchy mechanism.  The first few people to get
workstations were the kinds of people who could administer themselves.  But
now that every developer has one they generally expect everything to "just
work", and when it doesn't they want someone to complain to.  In order for
us to respond to problems we need to maintain some measure of control over
how each department uses their resources.

We're trying a middle-of-the-road solution now.  Each department has a
couple of people whose part-time responsibility is to manage that
department's resources.  However, since the central organization still has
the ultimate responsibility, we have to be able to understand their
configuration, so they can't vary their configurations too far from the
company norm.
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar