∂LOT William Miller$$Editing Use of LOTS∞

Dear Bill:

        Ed Feigenbaum told me that you expressed uneasiness about the
use of LOTS for  pure text editing.  Here  is the situation as  I see
it.

        1. As  I told you  a year  ago, I am  an enthusiast  for text
editing and  hoped to encourage  it as soon  as it became  clear that
LOTS was successfully meeting its other obligations.

        2. This condition has not been met and cannot possibly be met
any sooner than the end  of Fall quarter, since that quarter  will be
the first in which LOTS undertakes to satisfy a full course load.

        3.  I was  mistaken in  thinking that  editing of  papers and
dissertations would  require encouragement.   The problem  is whether
and how to suppress it.   The use started spontaneously, a  number of
PhD  theses  and  other  documents were  prepared  on  LOTS  now.  In
checking the new users who signed  up in the last month I  noticed at
least one student from the English department who put "thesis" as his
purpose in using LOTS.  It is hard to imagine that his intent  can be
much other than editing.

        4.  I  doubt that  editing  has been  an  important  cause of
overloading in the Spring quarter even though at some times I noticed
that about a  quarter of the  terminals were editing  something other
than programs.  I believe that the editor does not put  heavy demands
on the system.  However, this information is not certain, because the
operating system doesn't provide information about how much  one user
is competing with others.

        5. Towards the end of Spring quarter I was tempted to  try to
suppress editing  but refrained, because  there had been  no warning.
For Fall quarter, there will be a notice that  load-shedding measures
may be required  if there is a  crunch and that text-editing  will be
the first  to go.  In  particular, anyone who  expects to  complete a
term paper on LOTS runs the risk that he will get cut off just before
the end of the quarter if the load of running programs for courses is
too heavy.

        6. When we have met our other obligations, I will be  back to
you with plans and costs for encouraging text editing.

        7. I recognize that we  promised you a document on  the costs
of text editing.  I haven't had  time to do it myself, and  the staff



has been  overloaded with trying  to make the  system work  better to
handle the load.  We'll get to it.

        8. As you  know, our equipment  is scheduled for  delivery at
the end of September.  I think  we'll be able to put it  into service
promptly without too much thrashing  so that there is no need  to ask
CS105 and  CS106 to use  the 168 again.   However, there is  not much
room for bad luck or for adapting to surprises about the  behavior of
the new operating system we  expect to receive from D.E.C.  about the
same time.

        9. The one bit of information about the costs of text-editing
I can offer concerns the cost of disk storage.  We got a package deal
that included the two  new disk files -  I think that apart  from the
package, I  would have ordered  only one more.   Anyway we  can't say
exactly what they cost us.  The list price is about $35K per disk and
my guess is that we got  them for $25K which is still twice  what the
AI Lab  pays.  Dividing the  price by  50 to get  a monthly  cost and
considering  that a  disk contains  200 megabytes,  we get  $2.50 per
megabyte month.  A  very large thesis would  be about a  megabyte, so
this is an estimate of  the marginal storage cost.  I don't  yet have
estimates of the terminal costs or the CPU costs.  The terminal costs
are computable estimating $1K  per terminal amortized over  25 months
giving $40 per month and estimating 400 useful hours per  month gives
$.10 per hour terminal cost.  A student might spend 300  hours typing
and editing  his thesis giving  $30.00 for that.   As I said  the CPU
costs are harder to allocate.   The share of the personnel  and other
costs that should be allocated to editing is even harder to estimate.
It should be considered low,  because we have put no staff  time into
improving editing or printing.   We also haven't had to  increase our
printing facilities.

        There are two other ways of estimating editing costs.   If it
were true, as Feigenbaum indicated that you thought it might be, that
the expansion had been forced to meet editing demands, then  the cost
would be rather large, but I'm sure this isn't so.  Another way is to
prorate  the  average cost  of  LOTS per  terminal  hour,  about $.75
including  everything.  Then  my hypothetical  300 hour  thesis would
cost $225, but I don't believe that either.

10. When we get to encouraging editing, an important possibility is a
smaller computer dedicated to editing.

11. During the summer, the research and thesis use of  LOTS increased
steadily.  The top  ten users got 1/3  of the computer time,  but I'm
sure they will claim that they used it late at night when no-one else
was competing for it.  The next 40 users got about another 1/4 of the



time.  If nothing were done, this use would grow linearly  with time.
Therefore, the first  task we shall undertake  concerning controlling
usage is to see what the big use was during the summer, and check its
compliance  with  the  LOTS  rules.   Then  the  Advisory  Board will
recommend changes  in detailed policy  to optimize use  in accordance
with general policies.

        I hope  this information  will reassure  you that  we haven't
unilaterally encouraged editing and that  we are more or less  on top
of the problem.

CC:  Ralph Gorin, Maurice Buzzari, Jim Adams