roy@ics.uci.edu (John M.A. Roy) (11/28/89)
I hear TOPS is pretty good. I want to connect IIcx's to XT's running DOS and Model 80's running OS/2, all connect to a IInt laser printer. All we really need on the IBM side is basic laser printing and ASCII file transfer to the Macs. Anything else will be great, but not essential. Will TOPS handle this? How many stations can TOPS handle without crawling along. Thanks to the net gurus, John M.A. Roy (714) 856-5039 ICS Dept., Univ. Calif., Irvine CA 92717 Internet: roy@ics.uci.edu
jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) (11/30/89)
roy@ics.uci.edu (John M.A. Roy) writes: >I hear TOPS is pretty good. I want to connect IIcx's to XT's running >DOS and Model 80's running OS/2, all connect to a IInt laser printer. >All we really need on the IBM side is basic laser printing and ASCII >file transfer to the Macs. Anything else will be great, but not >essential. Will TOPS handle this? How many stations can TOPS handle >without crawling along. There's a problem with that. Sun MicroSystems hasn't developed TOPS for OS/2, in fact, other than DayStar Digital there isn't even an AppleTalk card that supports microchannel. If NFS is available for OopS/2 (which I highly doubt) then your only option is to hang a ethernet board off the PC and the PS/2 and get a GatorBox to do the AFP <-> NFS translation. The problem is OS/2, I really haven't seen anybody other than MicroSoft develop anything for it. If you had it running SCO Xenix/Unix then your problems would be minimized and if worse comes to worse, you could always probably run TOPS as a DOS task under VP/ix. To give you an idea of how OS/2 is looked upon by developers, Borland has abandoned Turbo C for OS/2 and they didn't do it as a result of some marketing wizard saying let's cut it, they polled their users both amateur programmers and developers than use Turbo C and not a single one develops applications for OS/2 nor ever plan to. MicroSoft seems to own the monopoly on development for OS/2 because of one, they produce the only C compiler that supports development of OS/2 applications. Two, they developed OS/2. Three, OS/2 only really runs on PS/2's (the full version that utilizes MCA). Four, SCO Xenix 286 is faster (and this is my biased opinion). I could be wrong on the accounts of what's available for OS/2, but I do know that a lot of people just mothball it when they get a PS/2 and run MS-DOS 3.30 or MCA version of SCO Xenix. The only thing that OS/2 seems to have going for it is its ability to utilitize MCA, and that's it. I personally don't expect to see TOPS for OS/2 unless it really catches on or TOPS/Sun MicroSystems has developed their MCA AppleTalk card. Your only hope really unless somebody is working on AppleTalk for OS/2 is to dump OS/2 for another operating system. Again, I could be wrong, but I haven't heard anything of Sun MicroSystems working on TOPS or PC-NFS for OS/2. // John C. Archambeau /* **--------------------------------------------------------------------------* ** Flames : /dev/null (on my Minix partition) **--------------------------------------------------------------------------* ** ARPA : crash!pnet01!jca@nosc.mil ** INET : jca@pnet01.cts.com ** UUCP : {nosc ucsd hplabs!hd-sdd}!crash!pnet01!jca **--------------------------------------------------------------------------* ** Note : My opinions are exactly that...mine. Bill Gates couldn't buy ** my opinion...but he could rent it for a few nanoseconds. :) **--------------------------------------------------------------------------* */