The solution outlined by Mosteller's group is two-fold. First, the Houses would buy time on their own consoles nightly from 8 p.m. to midnight for relatively unrestricted undergraduate use. Second, the Faculty would allocate a separate fund, to be administered through the departments, for course work involving greater input and therefore requiring the 7094's.

The consoles are inadequate, says Mosteller, because "it is possible for a man to think up a legitimate problem that would tie up the computer." The SDS 940's on-line operation involves a relatively small amount of total input, even when all 32 possible teletypes are in contact.

As a rule, computer work done by math, statistics and physics students is of the sort the SDS can accommodate: small in input, even when the solution process is complex. The Humanities and Social Sciences, and in some cases the Natural Sciences, often require work with a much larger input, sometimes too large for the time-sharing system.

The inefficiencies suggested by departmental requests for computer hardware were only part of the reason for creating Mosteller's committee. It was also prompted by the dramatic leaps which another school, Dartmouth, has recently taken in the instructional use of computers.

Dartmouth has its own time-sharing system, somewhat different from Harvard's, but more extensive and more extensively used over the last few years. Many of the computer committee's suggestions were based directly or indirectly on the comparative success of Dartmouth; "Harvard," Mosteller says, didn't seem to us "to be leading or perhaps even keeping up."

The committee did not recommend any new computer purchases, concluding that the existing facilities were inadequately utilized now. But if Harvard has enough computers, its computers and their operators seem not to have enough space. Already the Computer Center is splintered off into several separate locations in Cambridge and one in Boston proper.

Dix sees another obstacle to expanded computer use at Harvard--the "have" school's difficulty getting Federal funds. Mosteller attended a computer conference this weekend at the University of Maryland, where the main concern was the setting up of conferences to help specifically small schools gain access to computer networks.

Dartmouth, Dix says, has "considerable private endowments" in the computer area. Harvard, to undertake the kind of expanded computer activity recommended by Mosteller and his colleagues, will have to eke out funds from the Faculty, which this year ran an unusual financial deficit.

The prospectus, despite the computer committee's 72 pages of explication, is not all rosy, which makes it the more remarkable that Mosteller can declare, "We'd like to be able to say, 'The equipment is available, go and use it.'"