But only about 15 percent of users at Harvard use the Eudora program, according to a survey by HASCS last spring, because it does not allow users to save messages in a central area, where they can later be accessed from another remote location.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, a computer science professor, says the College does not want to restrict students' software options.

"The major recommendations of the FAS IT reports...have not been accompanied by descriptions of specific hardware and software platforms," Lewis says. "One size does not fit all in this environment."

Working out the Kinks

HASCS's UNIX staff has been working long hours this term trying to work out the kinks in the new system, but until recently things have only gotten worse.

"When you have a little bit of noise in a system, things start to go wrong everywhere," says McKay Assistant Professor of Computer Science Margo I. Seltzer '83, an expert in system architecture.

In October, HASCS added an accelerator card to the FAS machine in order to make it faster and upgraded the communication channel between the FAS machine and the mail server, according to Osterberg.

But problems persisted, and Jones pressed Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles for an improvement on Tuesday, Nov. 12. Ironically, the system hit rock bottom at the end of that week.

Two days after the Faculty meeting, the UNIX group noticed that the mail server was using only half its memory, Osterberg says.

Technicians brought the system down to install new memory. When that failed they reconfigured the system software to fix the memory problem, according to Osterberg. But then the machine started to process the backlogged mail and the system again became absurdly slow.

A day later, HASCS's technicians realized that part of the problem was being caused by the Eudora program. Although fewer students use Eudora, the way they used it was crippling the system.

Many Eudora users had the program set to automatically check their mail every minute or less, placing an overwhelming demand on the system.

"If you're a Eudora user and you're checking your mail every hour, we love you," Osterberg says. "If you're checking you're mail every minute, you're worse than a Pine user."

HASCS then revised the setup of the machines to only allow Eudora users to check their mail every 15 minutes.

As a result, some of the kinks have been ironed out.