Re: [seul-edu] Basic System Wish List (SMTP)

[Dave Prentice <dprentice@uno.edu>]

Dave Prentice
prentice@instruction.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Colin Dellow <plarf@moo.ca>
To: seul-edu@seul.org <seul-edu@seul.org>
Date: Friday, August 24, 2001 4:50 PM
Subject: Re: [seul-edu] Basic System Wish List (SMTP)


<snip>
>The second option is network connections.  With 6 network cards
>(figure $20 each) linked into a hub (figure $70) linked into a server
>computer (figure at least $500) you could, theoretically, turn those
>machines into something useful.  They'd suffer a performance hit as
>they would have to load programs from the network and receive
>display information from the network
>
I have bought many a 10mb ethernet card for $1 each on ebay. (Do a search
for "NIC" then "lot of" to buy them in quantity.) They work just fine for a
small classroom environment. Also, you can frequently pick up hard drives of
around 500 meg for about $10 each. They will hold a decent size distro. Hubs
of around 11 to 16 ports can be had for $49 or so.
    If you go with something like this, for under $100 (at
pcsurplusonline.com) you can get a machine such as a Pentium 166 to use as a
file server for your big programs like WordPerfect. It will be quite fast
enough to service your 6 clients. Trust me, I've even used a 100mhz 486 as a
server for 10 clients running WordPerfect or FrameMaker.

>If you want a GUI, you'd have to spend $690.  That's a shame, but
>it would resurrect some PCs from the dead.  If you can't afford to
>do this, I'm afraid you're going to be stuck with simple text editing
>and programming.  Don't get me wrong though, I would have been
>very, very happy if my school had six computers with pico and perl
>on them.  But then, I'm a geek. :)
>
>Good luck with whatever course you pursue!
>--
>-- Colin Dellow
> plarf@moo.ca  - "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you
> have to support it for the rest of your life."
> - Michael Sinz
>