Hardware Support in Computer Science
(For the curious: The drive in the above picture is a Fujitsu M2284K hard drive, and it's HUGE! Each of the 3 platters is over a foot across and the whole unit is about 50 lbs. Capacity? 150 MEGABYTES. It used to live in a VAX 11/780 and was in full use until 1989.)
Hardware support in Computer Science at Indiana University covers a wide area. Duties include assembly, installation, maintainance, and repair of all
equipment owned by CSCI (Computer Science). This is a job that I share
with the rest of the Systems Staff.
The type of things included are: assembly and installation of PC's, Macs, and UNIX workstations; deployment of peripheral equipment such as laserwriters and external hard drives. In addition, I am responsible for repairs of the
above as well as software installation on PC's and Macintoshes. I also
do lead administration for two Macintosh servers, one with the older
"Classic" Mac O/S, and one with Mac O/S X installed with file sharing
and an Apache webserver with two sites supported. I also do component level repair of monitors and printers, and install cards, memory, drives, etc. into workstations of every type.
Network installation is also a part of this job. This means I PULL WIRE. If you have never installed a LAN this means that I'm one of the people who make sure your machine actually gets a piece of wire connected to it in the right way on the right card, so you can connect and read documents like this one.
It also means that I install the NIC (Network Interface Card) and very likely the necessary software as well.
I am also responsible for researching and buying much of the
hardware needed for our facility. I participate in grant funding
developement by doing research for new and emerging technologies that
may be funded by grants the department could receive. This can be
interesting and at times exciting, as some of the technology I
research is pretty cutting edge.
This is not an exhaustive list of what I might have to cover under the
name of hardware support, but I think you get the idea. If you have any questions or concerns about any of the hardware in CSCI, drop me or one of my afore
mentioned colleages a note. We are here to help and facilitate operations in the department.