kevin@harvard.UUCP (Kevin Crowston) (04/11/86)
marty schoffstall of RPI writes (flames?): > How about protocols (xns) that historically have not been > placed in the public domain so people could implement them. While this may have been "historically" true, it's not true now. Xerox seems anxious and eager for other people to use XNS. They even run something called the Xerox Systems Institute to help them do it. I believe that BSD 4.3 Unix supports XNS as well as TCP/IP. 3Coms ethernet stuff for IBM PCs is based on XNS and you can get a package for the PC that allows you to use XNS mail, file and print servers. > Would you like your favorite machine with large disks to file serve for them Reference is made in the documentation to file services under Unix and VMS. In fact, a Vax supports LEAF, which is arguable a better protocol since it supports random access, which, as schoffstall correctly points out, the current NS file servers do not. (It's said to be in the next release, due out this spring.) (I should point out that the documentation I'm refering to is the Interlisp release notes, so this may not apply to Viewpoint or XDE, which I don't use.) > We have had two of these machines at RPI for a long time and so far > I have been unimpressed. I have a dandelion (an 8010 or 1108) sitting on my desk, and I'm not unimpressed. It's by no means perfect, but it's also not as bad as schoffstall seems to think. It should be noted that the MIT Sloan School is the recipient of a grant from Xerox, so I could be accussed of being biased in their favour. I still like the machine though and think that many of schoffstall's comments are either out of date or based on dislike rather than hard fact. -- Kevin Crowston UUCP: {seismo,ut-sally}!harvard!kevin MIT Sloan School of Management ARPA: kevin@xv.mit.edu or kevin@harvard.arpa