Who are the users?: an analysis of computer use in a university computer center

This is a study of how the users of the University of Washington computing center exercise its machinery. Our hope is to make an undramatic but useful contribution to knowledge. In a simpler day the distinction was made between "scientific" and "business" computing. Undoubtedly this contrast is still useful for many purposes, but finer distinctions are needed. We shall present statistics showing that, within a community which contains not a single "business" user, there are distinct groups with quite different machine requirements. Of course, nobody who is aware of modern computing would seriously dispute this. Our contribution is to provide statistics on the relative size of the different groups. We also offer this report as an example of methodology. The usefulness of our numbers to another center will depend upon the extent to which the other center is like ours. The ways in which we acquired and analyzed our statistics would be useful more generally.