The hardware/software environment

As the school was relatively poorly equipped to begin with, it purchased and installed an entirely new group of PCs. This included four 166 MHz Pentium MMX workstations with 17" monitors/32M RAM and a 180 MHz Pentium Pro server with 15" monitor and 64M RAM. A 10bT Ethernet LAN was set up using Windows NT for the workstation group. An ISDN line to the mainland was set up with some difficulty, providing up to a 128 kbaud link. Considerable work was required to regularize the networking (routing, e-mail, Web servers, etc.).

One of the serious challenges to the project was the installation and maintenance of a stable PC environment at the school. The CECM is primarily a UNiX-based research group. While some significant PC expertise was available during the project, it rapidly became clear that the PC network software presented unique challenges. After myriad reinstallations, workarounds and trials, a highly simplified implementation of Windows NT was settled on, foregoing many of the features anticipated for use in the project.