choster - 4:24 am on Jan 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

There may be some local application which some professor developed to run as a plugin for NN4 back when it was cutting edge (1996). I know my university had a few machines around so they could run ancient real mode DOS programs from the 1980s-- purchased for thousands of dollars at the time and, for the purposes of the lab exercise or basic statistic reports or whatever, still adequate.

Universities tend to be conservative with the installations they put in "public" labs and libraries. The newest applications are usually rolled out at high-end labs and research centers-- they after all are the ones who have received the funding for it-- and the site licenses rotated down. At many institutions the machines themselves may simply have been retired from one of their high-end research centers or graduate study facilities. It's sort of like the junior varsity team being granted access to the weight equipment in the gym... because the varsity team has built a whole new weight room for itself.

Firebird is still in development, making it an even tougher sell for a whole university. But I wouldn't be surprised if it were being used in corners of the CS department.