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[fmikehugo]

University of Tokyo buys 1,150 iMacs
By Peter Cohen [e-mail]
October 03, 2003 7:20 am ET

The Asahi Shimbun reports that Japan's University of Tokyo has decided to buy 1,150 iMacs from Apple as part of an upgrade to replace 1,600 five-year-old Linux systems now in use at the university. The iMacs will be made available to students, professors and instructors at the university next March.

The newspaper reports that the decision was made because of Mac OS X's ease of maintenance, thanks to its Unix underpinnings -- an operating system that the staff is already largely familiar with. The availability of free software to run on Mac OS X was also considered a benefit.

The Asahi Shimbun reports that the iMac order is part of a larger deal that the University of Tokyo signed with NEC Corp. to install 1,400 computers on Komaba, Hongo and Kashiwa campuses. What's more, the university plans to use Macs -- presumably Xserves -- as network servers on the LAN.

A small contingent of special-purpose computers and Windows based systems -- about 200 -- will remain.