The J notation plays a fundamental role both in the exposition of computer science topics and in the laboratory experiments. Because of this, an effort was made to design a laboratory facility which could be used for lecture exposition as well as laboratory experimentation.
For a number of reasons, including using this laboratory/teaching facility for a variety of other courses, we made a decision to base this laboratory on machines which run the UNIX operating system. J 2.06 is used on the lab machines.
Grant proposals to the Meadows Foundation and the National Science Foundation (grant DUE-9452050) were prepared. Each organization agreed to fund 50% of the cost of laboratory equipment. A vendor competition involving Apple, IBM, Sun, SGI and HP was designed which involved running certain benchmarks and meeting a color graphics requirement of at least 8 bits per pixel on a display of at least 1024 by 768 pixels. Each vendor also had to meet other requirements involving memory capacity, UNIX operating system, disk capacity and networking.
One additional requirement, to be used in the lecture course, was the ability for a lecturer to be able to use a machine for presentations and demonstrations and have these presentations be visible on the screens of each of the student workstations. We proposed that this could be accomplished either by using a video amplifier/switching system fed by the instructor's workstation monitor or a network based software video feed.
HP won the vendor competition with 17 HP 712 machines of varying configuration. There are 15 HP 712/60 16M student workstations, 1 HP 712/60 32M instructor workstation and 1 HP 712/80 32M server machine providing login id's and home directories to each student workstation. HP also supplied an X windows based software package, SharedX, which allows the instructor machine to share any of its windows with any of the student lab workstations. In addition, SharedX also allows the instructor to turn over control of any of its windows to any of the student workstations. This means that students can, at the discretion of the instructor, provide responses to instructor queries which can be seen at all of the other student workstations. We are conducting a variety of experiments on how to use this facility in a lecture and lab environment.
When used either as a lecture room or as a lab room we seat two students in front of each workstation. This limits class size to 30 students per section which is an appropriate maximum size for this kind of course.