dp@JASPER.PALLADIAN.COM.UUCP (01/27/87)
A few more bits on apollo re are you trapped? the major problem I have with the apollo hardware, is the silly ring net. not on theoretic basis, but one reflecting on my role as part time cable slinger. The ring is a royal pain to add another machine to. you must break the cable, (or more typicialy come up with another segment and pull both wires to the new office) and you must keep the ends of the cable identified, as the ports are labeled IN and OUT, and it very much matters. To their credit, they have come up with a rather large wall socket assembly that does most of this, but you have to have electricians install them, etc.. we only have a few machines which get moved rather often, and we have not wired the bldg.... since no other machines machines speak ring you will have to have both cables around. ether is somewhat easier, as things like LAT's exist, and you can incrementally extend the net, without having to route cable back to the start of the net and you can also partition it into segments for diagnostic purposes. the BNC connectors used by the ring are easier to install (and cheaper too.) than the type N connectors (or most of the vampire cable taps) the ether uses. (yes a vampire tap isn't hard to install, unless you want it to work as well. We have decided to forbid them, and thin cable on our ether.) The monitor and keyboard are connected by short dedicated cables to the cpu box, so you cant stack a bunch of machines with their noisy fans, cooling, and power requirements (I belive in supplying computers with conditioned power) in a computer room somewhere, keeping only the consoles in your office. (it is worse with the older processors. there is a version that uses a bit slice processor (pre 68020), is the size of a large dorm room fridge, and does a wonderful job of overheating a typical office. the TCP stuff works fine, (or at least it talks to the 'bolics machine) tho we don't try to do anything complex (like virtual tty, spooled print, or mail) with it, it is only a file connection. I do not think it is a strict limitation (I remember someone mentioning that you can supdup from your lispm and play hack) the setup was less problematic than I expected. (no worse than installing anyone elses canned tcp system) the cartridge tape drives are very slow (even the apollo people complain). The only "its not real unix" problem we saw is that the file system layout is private, and when the thing got corrupted there weren't tools (or sufficient information) to patch it back together. <dp>