lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (03/27/85)
Greetings. After discussions with various parties involved in the project, it appears reasonable to establish a "temporary" Stargate network (primarily for demonstration purposes) while we await more formal administrative alignments and the availability of the production model decoders. Here's what I'm trying to do. Right now I have access to two of the old style (no internal error correction, rack mount, fairly expensive) decoder units. These units will be incompatible with the new, inexpensive, units that will be available sometime in the near future. However, these older units are functional for demonstration and testing purposes, and I can probably obtain a small number more of these units. In fact, I think I can get access to 6-10 more of this model in the very near future. If anyone (especially fairly major sites) are interested, I can probably make these available for your temporary use to receive whatever materials we send over the satellite during this phase of the experiment. Exactly what will be sent is somewhat unclear, but some netnews-type materials should be flowing in fairly short order. At this point, all material will be arriving in a pretty much continuous 1200 bps stream, without flow control (other than occasional pauses if these prove helpful at this stage). Of course, we don't yet have the "buffer boards" of which I've spoken in the past, and we can't even really start the design of these for sometime. However, the current Stargate stream can be treated much as a 1200 bps AP newswire feeding into a system--you'll be able to capture most of the data, and the occasional stuff that gets lost due to lack of flow control won't be important during this experimental period. Remember that this data is all for experimental purposes, certainly NOT to replace existing phone links at this point. There are quite a few possibilities for interesting experiments given 10 or so sites in a demo net, and there's a good chance (not a complete certainty) that I will be able to obtain these old decoders for the experiment at no cost other than shipping. It will probably be necessary for sites receiving the equipment to pay the shipping costs, and of course the equipment will have to be returned when the experiment terminates or when we switch over to the new, production model decoders some (how many is unknown) months from now. I don't have exact information regarding the availability of the old decoders yet, but the situation looks hopeful for getting a batch for some experimentation. If your site is interested (and you have access to WTBS in a reasonable location for hooking up the gear) please let me know. In case there are too many interested parties, I will be forced to make fairly arbitrary choices to distribute the available decoders. Thanks much. --Lauren--