Getting Ready for Fall Semester

• Construction and Upgrading in the ADN Public Labs
• Borg is Ready for Prime Time
• Extra Help at the Start
• Announcing Dialin-6
• Windows 95 Anyone?
• The ITL is Nearing Completion

Yet again, we are happy to announce that we are in the process of upgrading and expanding our public labs. The current work is part of a new plan, funded in large part with the support of Dr. John Wanat, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, to double the number of computers in the ADN public labs over three years, and then to replace one-fourth of the lab machines each year to maintain our current high quality.

Open now in CCC:

A large new lab -- Room 340 Chicago Circle Center, 750 South Halsted. The lab has 69 Dell Pentiums running DOS and MS Windows and a Hewlett-Packard 5si MX PostScript printer. The Dells are fancy machines -- Pentium 166s with 32 M of RAM, sound cards, and CD-ROM drives.

Coming soon to SRH:

The lab in room 205 of the Student Residence Hall, 818 South Wolcott, is moving to room 317, and in the process, it's acquiring 10 additional machines (Dell Pentium 166s, just like the ones in CCC 340), making a total of 18 machines in the lab. The SRH lab is not a "public" lab; its use is limited to SRH residents, and you need an SRH key to enter it.

And -- finally -- it's here at BGRC:

The construction and remodeling of the existing ADN PUBLIC lab in room 105 BGRC, 1940 West Taylor, is finally complete. The old machines (really old DOS-only machines) in the lab have been replaced by 13 Dell Pentiums running DOS and Windows, and 23 PowerMacs. The back half of the lab, with 19 PowerMacs, is now a separate room, BGRC 105 B. This provides a much-needed Mac lab/seminar room for the west side of campus.

Like the other Computer Center lab/seminar rooms, BGRC 105 B will be open for public use whenever it's not being used for a seminar or class. (Four of the PowerMacs are in the front half of the room, BGRC 105A; they will available even when BGRC 105 B is being used for a seminar.) Also like the other ADN lab/seminar rooms, BGRC 105 can be reserved by faculty or staff for seminars or class meetings that require such facilities. Use the World Wide Web to reserve BGRC 105 B or another ADN AB/seminar room for your class or seminar; the URL is: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/pclabs/reserve/

Along with the new/expanded labs, we have several new Novell servers, to serve both the ADN PUBLIC labs (and all the new ADN Novell accounts) and faculty and staff who have ADN Server Services on their desktop machines. (Server Services makes popular software available over the network.) These servers were funded through the Instructional Technology Improvement Plan.

Back to Contents

Our Convex Exemplar supercomputer, borg, has been very stable during the testing and construction period it's had over the summer. It is now ready for use by anyone in the UIC community who has a legitimate need for intensive compute power. See borg Update for a bit more, and check out its WWW home page at: http://www.uic.edu.

Back to Contents

We always get a big crowd of people opening their ADN accounts around the beginning of the semester, and the crowd in the fall can be really big. We get electronic lists of faculty, staff, and registered students from various sources; if we know who you are from these lists, you should be able to "autocreate" your account without help from us.

The autocreation process is rather simple. You stop by an ADN PUBLIC personal computer lab, pick up the "Account Creation Procedure" handout, sit down at a convenient machine, double-click the Account Create icon, and follow the instructions. What you'll actually be doing is introducing yourself to us electronically and then use a numeric code from your UIC photo ID and your birthdate to prove to us that you're really you. If the information you give us matches the information we have about you, we say "Hi, here's your account and here are our policies."

While the autocreate process itself works pretty well (a bit slowly, perhaps, when it's very busy), we've had problems in the past with the quantity and quality of the data in our lists and with their timeliness. New students have been a particular problem -- they wouldn't be on our lists at all until they after they registered, and then weeks more might go by before we found out about them. (The method we used to get the lists of registered students was somewhat primitive -- it involved writing, shipping, and reading computer tapes. Worse than a "sneakernet"!)

Now, though, the new university i-card ID has moved the autocreate process into the electronic age. Get your i-card now and we'll know all we need to know about you for you to autocreate your account within an hour! So give autocreate a try; you might be pleasantly surprised.

Back to Contents

Dialin-6 now provides 32 additional dialin telephone lines, at (312)413-3500. Dialin-6 is exactly like Dialin-4 and Dialin-5, providing 28,800 baud modems and full Internet access after you login using your ADN netid and your ADN password.

Back to Contents

The ADN's public IBM-compatible PCs have always given you the choice using DOS or MS Windows. We're now in the process of adding a third option

Microsoft Windows 95. We'll be installing Windows 95 on the DOS/Windows machines in the ADN PUBLIC labs over the next few months. (We can't do it all at once because Windows 95 requires a real local hard drive for swap space. Until now, our public PCs have been "diskless", so we have to install hard drives in each machine before it can use Windows 95.)

The first of the ADN labs that you'll find Windows 95 in are: SEL 2058, BGRC 105A, the newer machines in the Main Library and in BSB B1001, and the new lab in CCC 340 (all 69 machines!). We'll also put Windows 95 in the labs we manage for the Honors College and the Latino Cultural Center (their machines already have hard drives).

Back to Contents

Like the Library's InfoTech Arcades (in the Main Library and the new one in the Health Sciences Library), the ITL will be a place to go to digitize content, acquire or develop multimedia, and to get help on authoring instructional materials for computer use, like putting class materials on the World Wide Web.

The ITL will also showcase existing and emerging technologies of relevance to computing, computer-aided instruction, and network applications. The ITL is connected to the ADN's new high-speed ATM network, and it's just down the hall from the Computer Center's senior staff and networking experts, so it will also be the place to go to explore old and new computer solutions, as well as high-bandwidth network applications.

For more information on the ITL, please contact Ed Garay at garay@uic.edu or (312)996-0188, or send email to the ITL support staff at ITL@uic.edu.