Students at MUSC should be noticing a difference in the way their e-mail operates. A new computer with vastly improved performance has replaced the workhorse Atrium, the Center for Computing and Information Technology (CCIT) announced recently.

John Imholz, systems analyst for Academic and Research Computing Services (ARCS), said that the new DEC Alphastation 250 4/256 (a UNIX computer) would be “significantly faster” than the present Atrium host computer.

Atrium is the heart of the ARCS network. It is host to Pine e-mail and Homeroom services, among others. This is the server on which all students read their e-mail.

Imholz said that three things would be noticeable from the start: “First, things will go a lot faster. Second, an updated version (3.96) of Pine will display a ‘welcome’ message and will ask you if you want documentation sent to you by e-mail. You should answer ‘no’ to this question. (The document you would have been sent is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.washington.edu/pine/tutorial/.) Finally, any personal programs that you may have written in a computer language such as C or C++, won't run. The new hardware and software will require you to recompile your programs first.” He noted that the recompile problem will affect “very few people.”

With the new Atrium host will come an unlimited number of concurrent connection licenses. This means that you should no longer experience any “too many users” error messages.

The new machine will run Digital UNIX 4.0b. It features 192 Mb RAM and a 1 GB system disk. A gigabyte is a billion bytes in U.S. terminology. The old Atrium computer will stay in service as Aatrium1" for the next month or so to allow time for those who need to recompile their programs.