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C00002 00002	COMPUTATION REQUIREMENTS OF THE COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
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COMPUTATION REQUIREMENTS OF THE COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT


	The Computer  Science Department is  the largest user  of the
Stanford  Computation Center for instructional  purposes,  because of
our responsibility for  the elementary computing  courses as well  as
for our  advanced and graduate  courses. For  this reason,   the next
round  of computation  facilities at the  Stanford Computation Center
is especially important  to us, and we  have compared our goals  as a
department with  the technological possibilities and  come to certain
conclusions.

	Our main objective with regard  to computation is to be  able
to switch our  undergraduate teaching,  graduate teaching,   graduate
student  research, and faculty  research all to  the interactive mode
of using  computers.   We also  wish to  be able  to experiment  with
developing a  cost-effective way of  teaching the use  of programming
languages by computer.

	To  this end,  we  have  developed  a plan  for  acquiring  a
department  system  of  keyboard  and  display  terminals,   and  the
University  has  made  raising  $200,000  for  this  system   a  gift
opportunity in the Campaign for Stanford.

	However, going to interactive  computing for the  departments
teaching  activities imposes  some  requirements on  the  Computation
Center's plan  for re-equipment.  We don't  want tell the Computation
Center how  to  do its  business,   but  we  are convinced  that  our
requirements  are  technically  and  financially feasible,    and  we
request  that  each seriously  considered  plan be  formally compared
with these  requirements,  and only  plans  that pass  be  considered
further.

	We see our requirements as follows:

	1. We  should be  able to switch  all our courses  to on-line
use at a cost no greater than  Stanford is now paying for the use  of
the Computation Center by the Computer Science Department.

	2.  These  costs  should include  an  allocation  of  250,000
characters of disk  storage to each student in a course.  (IBM rental
for such  storage is  $2.50 per  month, but  present  charges are  25
times this.)

	3.  These costs  need  not  include the  use  of the  display
system  being  obtained  for  the  department  since  this  is  being
provided for separately.

	4.  It  is estimated that each  student will use from  two to
four times as  much computing in the interactive mode  as he now uses
in batch processing,  but we think that this can be solved either  by
the  cost of  computation  being  less  with the  new  generation  of
machines or by keeping a fully amortized IBM 360/67.

	5. Should it  turn out that the major costs are for personnel
rather than for the  machines themselves,   a mode of operation  that
prevents these costs from inflating is recommended.

(this document is CSDCOM.REQ[ESS,JMC])