Campus Personal Computing: uses, evolution, and new perspectives

This paper first presents a survey of campus computing projects describing in detail the aspects that matter the most. These projects have the common goal of integrating Personal Computers in academic regular activities. From this description it becomes clear that almost all of these projects adopt standard PC platforms, that offer a common set of installed software applications, recommended by the institution. Currently, a significant portion of these initiatives adopted mobile PC platforms as the platform of choice. It is then shown that further developments are still possible if mechanisms for accessing the execution of heterogeneous applications are transparently given. This system concept—universal access to applications—is discussed together with its main technical problems. Such a system design—SDUA—, for allowing users of an academic campus universal access to applications, is then presented. The main objective of SDUA is to provide their users access to its offered applications, from any computer, in a uniform fashion. Finally, SDUA users, operational and functional requirements, and principal services are identified. Keywords— Campus Personal Computing, Distributed Systems, Global Campus Computing, Ubiquitous Applications, Collaborative Work.