OLC: An On-Line Consulting System for UNIX

Helping users learn the intricacies of UNIX, particularly in a custom environment, is always a challenge. Helping thousands of users in an environment that is distributed both geographically and computationally is especially difficult. Project Athena has developed an "On-Line Consulting" system (OLC) that enables users to ask questions of consultants located "somewhere on the network." OLC allows a staff on the order of twenty students to handle the questions and problems of over 8000 users on a network of more than 900 workstations. This paper describes the motives and design goals for OLC, its implementation, and some of the results of its three years of operation. 1. Background on Project Athena Project Athena was originally conceived as a five-year experiment in the uses of computers in undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With support from Digital Equipment Corporation and International Business Machines Corp., M.I.T. embarked on the construction ..