Providing Access for the Scholars Work Environment (SWE)

Abstract

California State University, Los Angeles provides a common interface for all academic PCs, Macs, Clones, Workstations, etc. connected to the campus backbone. This encompasses all full time faculty, many academic staff (approximately 1200 user nodes), and 34 academic labs. This fully distributed system has some 27 network servers, 18 subnets, and supports nine different operating systems. The SWE interface appears on any desktop machine when it is booted and provides icon and pull down menu access to the many digital resources (Information Resources: reference, text, numeric, image and relational databases; Computing Resources: application, print, file, timeshare and client/server services; Communication Resources: mail, bulletin boards, electronic conferences, network news and list servers.) available through the campus, CSU, regional, and national networks. This paper will discuss the longer term goals, conceptual objective, primary technical barriers that had to be overcome, the network design, an incremental development plan, and the academic utilization of the releases of SWE. Paper presented at CAUSE94, the full proceedings of which are available through this Library as PUB1094.