Erlkönig: MCC November 1989

Systems administration accomplishment summary

MCC Packaging/Interconnect, November 2, 1989

The MCC P/I program made its initial entry into Sun workstations in November of 1987 by purchasing six workstations for the CAD design group, thereby establishing precedent for the purchases which have followed. When I joined MCC in September of 1988, the workstations in P/I were still being used in a manner more appropriate to the obsolete PC's legion elsewhere in the program.

Since that time I have integrated our program's Suns into what is, in effect, a single powerful environment for research, communications, design, and development. Each of the workstations in P/I is now supported by the applications, libraries, and data resident across the entire network. Every new workstation now becomes part of an effectively and fully realized UNIX network whole, wherein every new purchase increases the value of those already made. I have further broadened the environment by bringing these assets to many of the other types of systems in the program, through the implementation of UNIX resource sharing with the PC's as well as the Amiga and MacIntosh microcomputers. Currently there are ten Suns and approximately twenty active users. The 1.4 gigbytes of data on the network currently support well over one thousand user and system programs, and over six thousand pages of on-line documentation. The mean user proficiency and overall productivity are increasing steadily, and I expect this trend to accelerate over the coming years. I am particularly pleased by the growth of X, a window system making it possible to interact fully with graphic applications running on remote workstations from the console of a microcomputer or X-terminal. This sophisticated concept is already in use by Aubrey Sparkman on an Amiga, and provides a cost-efficient extension to the use of graphic workstation-level applications. This practice will very likely be seen on the MacIntoshes and even PC's during the coming year.

C. North-Keys
Associate Systems Analyst