Experiences With an Open Systems Computing Laboratory

Abstract

Open Systems are computing systems which are based on industry standards and nonproprietary multivendor components. As an increasing number of computing installations move away from single‐vendor proprietary architectures to more and more open architectures, academic institutions are increasingly faced with the responsibility of appropriately introducing open systems concepts into the undergraduate curricula. Using funding from the National Science Foundation, an open systems computing laboratory was recently set up at the University of Michigan‐Dearborn. The laboratory is based on the three most popular computing platforms today in the PC to Workstation range; namely IBM/PC, Macintosh, and Sun/UNIX. Supporting equipment include a postcript printer, a Novell network, a tape mass storage, and appropriate software and interfaces. A three credit‐hour course titled Open Systems Computing was offered in Summer 1995 to computer science and computer engineering majors. The course utilized the laboratory fully. T...