Students learn 'how-to's of information highway

Richard Montgomery High School '93 Rockville, Md. Electronic mail is shaking the foundations of modern communication, and University students are compatriots in this technological revolution. E-mail, as it is popularly known, has become a means of "free" communication, entertainment and information -- and the number of users world-wide is growing daily. At the University, programs have been put in place to teach students to use both the Internet and electronic mail system. Automatic account generators have been installed to give students easier access to the net. The system has, over time, become so popular that modem users are often frustrated by slow access due to overloads. So the key question persists -- will the University be able to put in place adequate technology to accommodate for the tremendous interest and use? The answer, according to Shumon Huque, system administrator for the School of Arts and Sciences Computing, is yes. According to Huque, new processors will be added this summer to reduce the current load. "We're making a number of changes to improve performance," he said. "We may decide to purchase two [new powerful servers] to keep ahead of the continually increasing demands for computing power." The mail.sas system, with about 5,000 users, processes more than 20,000 pieces of mail a day. ENIAC, which maintains active accounts for 91 percent of the students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, runs much faster because it distributes its load across several machines. The Internet is becoming an integrated part of campus life, ranging from upenn.talk, a newsgroup discussing campus issues, to class listservers sending information to all students in a particular course. Students say that the Internet has become imperative for communication with professors and other students, for information from the "gopher" directory and for personal letters and computer "conversations." "We haven't had significant complaints," said George McKenna, director of network operations for Data Communications and Computing Services. "What people are realizing is that performance is very dependent on the time of the month and time of the day. "We're identifying the issues now," he added. "Hopefully, we'll have something in place by September." In the meantime, students in the College of Arts and Sciences continue to experience slow response times and overload problems. But the combination of corrections, according to Huque, should dramatically improve the present system. New students will receive network IDs and active accounts when they arrive in the fall, and workshops explaining the use of the Internet have been scheduled for the beginning of the year.