🚀 go-pugleaf

    From: Mark Shoemaker <mas@Purdue.ARPA>

    > Why not relax and enjoy it?

    I wish we could -- but allowing approximately 4500 undergraduate
    students access to the ARPAnet (even if only through mail) seems,
    uh, unwise.

    I'm curious: are there any schools out there that give unrestricted
    ARPA mail access to all their students (and will admit it)?

    Mark		<mas@purdue>

I think your problem lies not in restricting mail access through
purdue to ARPA hosts, but in restricting mail access between machines.

At MIT's undergraduate comp center (mit-eecs) students often need to
communicate with their TA's via mail, who often keep accounts on other
research machines on the chaosnet.  Therefore, mail access to the
chaosnet is allowed.  It so happens that mail access to the ARPAnet is
done via the chaosnet, so students have mail access to the ARPAnet as
well.

It seems that mail is considered generally harmless to the ARPAnet by
those in a position to control access to it, so it was not disallowed.
It certainly could have been disallowed, since general use of the
chaosnet is not permitted for undergraduates (it requires a special
bit which enables one to write to the cha: device which is the chaos
network device on a DEC-20).  Undergraduates are not allowed to make
file transfers, telnet to other hosts, etc. unless they have that bit.
Since mail works the same way, it could have been restricted the same
way.

The policy of the undergraduate comp center was (at least up until a
couple of years ago) to deny chaosnet access to any undegraduates
using the 20 unless they actually worked there as staff, consultant,
or some other software support.  With the growing number of
undergraduate research opportunities at MIT, the number of chaosnet
access bits increased (the only other way to get chaosnet access was
to justify the need for it by having a non-guest account on another
chaosnet machine).  Nowadays many undergrads get chaosnet bits -- I'm
not saying this is right or wrong, just the way things are.

Speaking personally, having chaosnet access (implying ARPA access)
benefitted me greatly as an undergrad because I was able to get useful
technical information (unix-wizards, header-people, etc.) which I
wouldn't have got otherwise until my undergrad years had just about
ended.  I wouldn't have known half of what I knew coming out of school
without those bits.  Many other MIT undergrads feel the same way --
I'll forward the question to some of them so you can hear from them.

--gregbo
gds@mit-xx.arpa
gregbo%houxm.uucp@harvard.arpa
{allegra,cbosgd,ihnp4}!houxm!gregbo
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