BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB.ARPA (07/04/84)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB.ARPA> Several of us will be at NCC next week. It would be nice to get together with some of the INFO-IBMPC readers. Perhaps one of the manufacturers with a hospitality suite could host something? Are there any volunteers or failing that does anybody have any ideas of how to get together without making a big production out of it? -------
BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB.ARPA (07/23/84)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB.ARPA> As Manny Farber covered NCC pretty thouroughly. I will just add a few comments: APPLE I liked the Apple display. I was pretty impressed with the Macintosh third party software. While the software doesn't compare with the volume of software for the IBM-PC some of the stuff I saw was pretty imaginitive. MICROSOFT This was a great chance to ask a lot of questions that have been burning in the INFO-IBMPC community for a long time. Bill Gates was there himself, and people were really good about answering tough technical questions. If someone didn't know an answer they would find the right person. Microsoft windows was particularly interesting. Windows is one of these mouse driven execs similar to Vision or DesQ. It was running on a Tandy-2000 using Tandy's high resolution color display. I am not partial to color as I am wall eyed from too many years of staring at video displays, but I was assured windows would run equally as well on a Hercules card. While two tasks can not be simultaneously active there is a notion of tasking and memory management in that a task can be put to sleep and swapped out of memory as needed to make room for other applications. I was told that the system calls to accomplish this will be incorporated in future versions of MS-DOS. MS-Windows like MS-Word runs entirely in graphics mode. I was advised that if one had a character based application one would do well to use the current ANSI.SYS avoiding the BIOS set cursor and write character calls. Perhaps this explains the current ANSI.SYS's annoying habit of not using BIOS screen writes when in graphics mode. MS-Windows is available to Independent Software Vendors (ISV in Microsoft parliance) for $500. The bad news is all the routines are designed to be called from C. For those of us who write in Microsoft Pascal this isn't particularly good news as I assume this means we have to live with both the Pascal and C run time libraries loaded. There were promises of future support for Microsoft Pascal and FORTRAN, but it looks like unless Microsoft makes some attempt to unify their languages this could be a source of problems. I signed up for the Independant Software vendors program and will send in my $500 for Microsoft Windows as soon as they let me. If anyone else out there has MS-Windows I'd like to hear first hand reports. There may be good news from the languages side of Microsoft. I was told that the current version of the assembler "fixes all bugs we knew about". As that statement didn't ring true to my ears, I pressed further and was told that the assembler has been rewritten entirely and this new version runs four times faster than the current version. Unfortunately this version isn't even in beta test yet and there is no planned release date. In general I got the impression from most people in the Microsoft booth that they would really rather be working on the Macintosh or whatever 68000 bit mapped wonder than even 286 based versions of the pokey old IBM-PC. This also includes the belief that C is a reasonable programming language and Unix like operating systems are a desirable goal. I also got the impression that they are also universally bit with the "bit map is better" bug. 3Comm 3Comm is distributing free of charge the MIT IP/TCP code. The salesman was reluctant to acknowlege that this was code from MIT and seemed openly hostile to the idea of IP/TCP in the first place.
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (07/28/84)
> 3Comm is distributing free of charge the MIT IP/TCP code. The salesman > was reluctant to acknowlege that this was code from MIT and seemed openly > hostile to the idea of IP/TCP in the first place. Has 3Com given up on UNET? They seem to be pushing XNS and Fusion the last I heard. Is Fusion even compatible with Xerox at the (newly released) application layer? Will it talk to anybody else's XNS? (For that matter, did the latest Xerox release clear up all the compatibility problems or are there still incompable address resolution kludges needed?)
ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (08/02/84)
If 3Com was smart, they'd give up on UNET! It's among the worst attempts at TCP I've seen. Great if you want to talk to other UNET sites, not so hot at talking to real internetters. -Ron
jdd@allegra.UUCP (John DeTreville) (08/06/84)
From: ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc,net.lan
Subject: Re: NCC
Date: Thu, 2-Aug-84 11:34:22 EDT
If 3Com was smart, they'd give up on UNET! It's among the worst attempts
at TCP I've seen. Great if you want to talk to other UNET sites, not so
hot at talking to real internetters.
The principal problem with UNET is that it was one of the earlier available
implementations of TCP/IP. Such systems are typically debugged by seeing
whether they can talk with other systems (if they can't, it may be their
fault, or the other systems' fault, or both). When UNET first came out,
there weren't an awful lot of other TCP/IP implementations around to test it
against. As other implementations have come out, the process of testing
them has uncovered various bugs in UNET, which do get fixed.
The release of new implementations has also uncovered some unfortunate
overflexibilities in the TCP/IP specification, which allows for two
implementations, each of which conforms with the standard, to be unable to
communicate. These problems are solved by arriving at a (weighted) consensus,
and once again UNET has to be changed.
Cheers,
John DeTreville
Bell Labs, Murray Hill