Greetings all,
We've been looking into upgrading our computer resources here at the USC
Law Library, and we made a recent visit to the USC Medical Library to
check out their computer classroom. They have an interesting setup...so I
thought I'd pass the info along.
At that library, they have a computer classroom which has 20 workstations.
Each workstation has a Macintosh (Centris) and an IBM-clone (386s) stacked
right on top of the Mac. The workstations consist one Mac and one IBM
desktop case (motherboard, network/video/IO cards, hard drives, etc.) and
one monitor. The interesting part is that the Mac and the IBM share a
Multisync monitor by way of an A-B switch. The video can be switched
"on-the-fly." In other words, you can have an application running on the
Mac and an application running on the IBM, and you can simply switch the
video back and forth from one machine to the other. The whole classroom
is running on a Novell network. On the down side, two separate keyboards
and mice have to be used which is awkward.
This setup might be useful if you have limited space, and you teach
students about both IBM and Mac software. With this setup, it might also
be possible to teach both IBM and Mac versions of the same software _at
the same time_. If you have a computer classroom which is used to teach
both Mac and IBM software, this might be useful. This configuration
certainly saves space. It could also save you the cost of buying CRTs for
both machines should you need both machines in a limited space.
Of course, there are other means to this particular end. For example, the
new PowerMacs and the Mac Quadra 610's with 486SX cards, will run Mac and
some IBM operating systems on just one machine.
Darin Fox
Computer Services / Systems Librarian
University of Southern California Law Center
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