Olin Lab Intro

The Olin Lab
First, what is the Olin Lab? A word from our sponsors: The Olin computer lab was originally funded by grants from the NSF and HHMI, and is now a University lab that supports primarily the science division and secondarily the rest of campus. It has 17 PowerMac G4s with internal Zip drives and big monitors. No floppy drives, though, which is something of a bummer for compatibility purposes... There is a lab server, which is another PowerMac running a Linux distribution to support the the Linux computing environment used by the Math/CS Dept for computer science classes. It also supports the Web server for the HHMI Summer Teaching Outreach Program.

The computers in the labs behave just as you would expect Mac-type computers to behave (unless you boot them up in their Linux mode, but we'll not be getting into that...). Turn them on by pressing the "On" button (no, really: the symbol at the top-right of the keyboard and bottom right of the monitor).

Software
That's not much good without software, however. Applications on the lab computers are generally found on the "Applications" submenu that of the "Apple" menu at the top left of the screen (figure to left). For those of you who are Windows enthusiasts, this is like the "Programs" submenu on the "Start" menu available at the bottom left of the Windows screen.

If you want to follow along with the workshop yourself, start Netscape or Internet Explorer from this menu (if you haven't already...). If you are not familiar with Netscape, there are some Netscape help notes thoughtfully provided. =) If you want to use Internet Explorer that's ok too, but there isn't a thoughtfully provided help notes page for that...

Of course, to go to the workshop, you need its Web address: it's at
http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~glarose/htmlinfo/wkshops/web_wkshop02/

(Other applications that we'll find interesting include Adobe Photoshop and DreamWeaver!)