One to Many

Today's Agenda

• A Gathering of Macs
• A Note Regarding Mac vs. PC in the Science Lab
• Next time: The Next Generation

A Gathering of Macs

I began teaching in 1985, and within a few years I had accumulated two Apple IIes, an Apple IIgs, and an Apple II+ which I worked to death doing word processing, spreadsheets, and data collection (via the computers' game ports). Schools traditionally run about a generation behind in computer hardware - or longer - so I didn't really know what I was missing in the early Mac days.

The adventures with the Apple IIs are another story for another time. Suffice to say I was doing the laserdisc-to-computer-monitor trick long before Steve ever thought about it. Due to events unrelated to my computer experience, I eventually got an office job and left the classroom for a while.

I held a job in a small office where (among other duties) I was the tech-support guru. Mostly this consisted of clearing extension conflicts, adjusting memory, and adding the occasional hard drive or RAM chips. All of this, of course, was self-taught, and even today I face a looming deadline with my teaching certification which requires that I take a (so-called) educational computing course to be a legal teacher. I was responsible for an aging fleet of Macs (ca. 1994) including two Mac SE/30s, a Duo 210 with all the standard docks (which was my office computer), several Quadras, including a relatively new 630 (which resurfaces at the end of this story) and an 800. My boss used a PowerBook 140, I think, which had 4 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive.

Partially thanks to me and the home-office tech support chief (we were a branch office), I eventually got everyone onto Power Macs before I left that job for my current teaching position. The Power Macs left a lot of '020, '030, and '040 machines lying around the office. So, naturally, I begged to take some with me as donations. And so my first classroom set of computers was born.

Thanks to my previous job in an office, I had an enlightened view of how bureaucracies work, more awareness of office politics than perhaps the average teacher might have. I therefore set out to meet and offer my services to all the tech-savvy folks in the school and district. I cannot recommend this strategy enough. By yourself you are an island in a sea of Wintels, but with other (particularly Mac-friendly) people to connect with, you are an archipelago in a sea of Wintels. Fortunately for me, the majority of these folks were Mac friendly - or at least Mac/Wintel neutral.

At first, my computers were the original batch that I inherited from the previous job. I had no money and no installers, so I used SimpleText for word processing and the occasional piece of shareware for simulations or demonstrations. Along the way we tried out BBedit, Brian Burke's Tide Stamp (ocean tide predictor posted at shareware.com), several programs I wrote myself using Chipmunk Basic, GraphicConverter, and ClarisWorks/AppleWorks , for which the district had a site license.

This initial batch of computers were still running their original system software, everything from 7.0 to 7.5.5. Although most of them - even the SE/30s - had ethernet adapter cards, I hesitated connecting them to the school network until I had a good virus checker installed. Like everyone else, I installed Disinfectant, since I did not have the districts' installer disks for their site licensed virus checker. Every single Mac connected to the network without serious difficulty. I upgraded and downgraded the system software to 7.1 and kept things local on our LAN, not venturing outside our AppleTalk zone.

I eventually discovered that although every teacher was issued a copy of an Apple Educational Series notebook with many CD-ROMs in it, not everyone used the notebook. Thus, I obtained copies of Hyperstudio and Redshift on CD (although only two of my machines had CD players, I could install the software on machines with enough drive space through the network).

One of the SE/30s had the driver installed for a SyQuest 200 MB removable drive, so I made this one a server and used it for students to save files on over the network. I established five shared folders and five users (first period, second period, etc.) in the Users and Groups control panel. Each group could only connect to its own folder, and the entire class shared a single password. Since I had fewer than ten functional networked machines, this was not a strain on the SE/30.

The other thing I did was install Open Transport on all the machines using the downloadable installer from Apple's web site. This enabled me to lock out users from the TCP/IP and AppleTalk control panels, so users could not change zones without a password.

For printing, all the teachers were equipped with a Color StyleWriter 2500, which is fine for individual work, but totally outclassed as a workgroup printer. It doesn't support AppleTalk directly, but must be hosted by the computer it is attached to, much like a (wince) Wintel machine. Still, it worked after a fashion, and my students managed to creak out a few papers and some data graphs and a spreadsheet that first year.

Today most of these machines are still in service, although I am planning to wipe all the SE/30s and check them out to students who have no computers at home. Elsewhere in our school, we had three Mac labs, one equipped with G3s, and a Mac lab in the library as well. However, aside from the computer classes, the journalism class, and a few other classes, there were no regular-education classrooms (such as math, science, English, history, etc.) that had more than two or three machines. I began to tell everyone what sort of work my students were doing, and the demand for more machines began.

As I prepared more machines, I eventually settled on this combination of software as a standard installation for a 68K machine and made it my "standard package" for cleaning up a computer.

System 7.5.5 with Open Transport added (on every machine with enough RAM to run it), AppleWorks 5 (on the '020s and higher), Vernier Software's MacMotion and other sensor-software programs, Disinfectant, and Foolproof (a LAN management and security password utility), which I added when it came time to consider allowing students to surf on the Internet.

In next week's column, I'll tell the story of how I inherited displaced machines from around the campus and made the transition from pre-Power Mac to a mixed lab of Power Macs and G3 computers. I'll also show (with pictures) that you can convert a Quadra 630 into a Power Mac 5200/75 (not that it's all that great of an improvement, but a Power Mac is a Power Mac).

A Note Regarding Mac vs. PC in the Science Lab

In last week's column I described my views on why Macs were better for the school science lab. I received an interesting letter from someone regarding the use of Macs in the science research lab and thought I'd share this letter with you. As always, your comments on the Mac Lab Reports are welcome.

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There is one other reason for teachers to use Macs in the science lab, and that is that in many areas of science, Macs are common, while in some (medicine, biotechnology) they are often dominant.

I work in an officially PC-only environment, but I'm typing this on a Mac. To the consternation and horror of our head of IT (who hates Macs passionately, although he proudly boasts that he has never used one), some researchers are beginning to buy Macs with their own grant money, bypassing his previous stranglehold on PC purchasing. This is the beginning of the end for the PC hegemony here - I have worked in three previous institutions where Macs supplanted PCs almost completely, and it began in the same way. Individuals purchased machines until there were so many Macs the IT department was forced (reluctantly) to support them. At that point Windows begins to hemorrhage users until the only PCs left were in the offices, where purchasing is still done centrally.

The reasons to choose Macs in the lab are simple - the usual issues of easy support and ease of upgrading software and connecting hardware apply. In addition, however, most scientists use many different software packages. This is typically software which IT has never encountered before - not just office software - so they need to install and support the software themselves. That means ease of software installation/deinstallation, lack of conflict and cross-platform compatibility are of paramount importance. In addition, the ability to move data between different applications and rely on your machine are essential. Finally, in biology in particular, much of the specialist software we use was written by Mac-using biologists, so the software is simply not available on he PC or is only available in ported, feature-poor versions.

If you are teaching science, relying only on PCs as a matter of principle is, to be blunt, stupid.

Cheers, Mark

Dr. T. Mark Doherty, Statens Serum Institute, Copenhagen

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Thanks for your excellent letter, Mark. You make the point that the use of Macs in offices began with people bringing them from home (against IT wishes),* so once again we may remind folks this is still a valid strategy. Unfortunately at my school, I've seen teachers so frustrated with the slow response of the Power Mac 7500/75 running OS 8.6 (an OS which completely overwhelms the poor 12 MB machines) that they bring their Wintel laptops from home. This brings us to the "Macs are slow" objection, although they are comparing a five-year old machine to their current computer. Maybe our digital HS grant, a California program for putting computers in classrooms and will put an iMac DV on every desk, will turn some heads.

* Historical footnote: This was the standard way personal computers infiltrated businesses in the late 1970s and early 1980s - very much to the consternation of IT departments. dk