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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 serously 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])