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HONG KONG BAPTIST COLLEGE
The Computer Centre was established in 1972 and the present facilities include an IBM 1130 and a DATAPOINT 5500. There is no backing store associated with these machines and the range of software available to support the academic Departments is minimal. The complete staffing complement of the centre is as follows:
One manager, two programmers, three punch operatorS, and one administrative assistant who acts as the operations superviser.
Four student helpers are employed by the centre which has responsibility for the support of both the educational and administrative work of the college. A recent aquisition for the Computer Centre is a laboratory equipped with ten COMMODORE PET Microcomputers, five with 8K bytes of core store and cassette tape storage, and the remainder have 32K bytes of core store with dual floppy disk drive storage devices.
It must be said that the level of computing provision and the number of support staff is so low that the Centre cannot possibly provide an adequate computing service that is needed to support the academic courses. Since students using the facilities are also charged at a rate of $100 per semester, made necessary because of the low level of funding, it is inevitable that the academic experience of both staff and students is severely restricted in this important area of work. It clearly limits the students to such an extent that they are unacceptably underpriviledged by comparison with their counterparts at other institutions in terms of knowledge and . use of modern technology. A very substantial investment in interactive computing facilities is urgently required and details of the necessary levels of funding will be given by members on request.
The
The general requirements of a new system that is needed by the College can be identified at its minimal level as follows. system must be able to-
(a)
(b)
(c)
support up to 60 simultaneous terminals for time sharing work.
provide a batch service of up to 500 jobs per day, most of these being initiated from terminals; twelve terminals with associated fast printers would be required to support this
support about 3000 non-specialist registered users.