Using terminals versus card reader in remote job entry

Abstract

As enrollment in computer science departments continues to increase, institutions are finding it necessary to improve existing computer facilities. Many have chosen the “distributive processing” route whereby one central location handles a major portion of the workload of the schools connected to it, while each of the schools maintain some stand-alone capability. Schools are billed for work that is performed at the network center. In particular, student jobs are charged, whether individually or collectively, to a particular school or department. It is, thus, worthwhile to consider techniques for processing student jobs which will keep operating costs of a department to a minimum. This paper considers an approach that the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga (UTC) has taken to help minimize these costs. An experiment was designed in which, for one semester, students would continue to submit programs through the card reader. The succeeding semester, jobs would be submitted through terminals, i.e. no card punching would be done and students would transmit to Knoxville using the terminals. The “bonus point” method was employed in both cases. The courses selected were FORTRAN AND PL/I, the first two courses in the computer science curriculum and the major users (from UTC) of the network. The FORTRAN class used the WATFIV compiler and included some usage of the structured constructs available. Approximately seventy per cent of the students enrolled in this course were in majors other than computer science. The second course selected was PL/I which used the PL/C compiler at UTK. Approximately ten per cent of the students were non-computer science majors.