wahec@ecsvax.UUCP (Toni M. Hutto) (11/11/86)
IBM-XT text (WordPerfect)--> Macintosh Plus Any help would be appreciated to information leading to the capture of a communications package that would accept the XT's Wordperfect documents---as typed! and deliver it to the Macintosh for use with MicroSoft Word & Pagemaker! The latest version of Red Ryder hasn't worked....it strips returns and puts in its own. We have a 60 page book already on the IBM and would like to design layout and use the lazerwriter for production! Thanks in advance! reply to wahec@ecsvax
tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (11/14/86)
Thanks to the people who mentioned our transparent file access product,
TOPS. None of these articles mentioned that we have a VMS version in the
works, which is not surprising since it hasn't been officially announced.
However, we are allowed to talk about it, and to mention that work is now
proceeding on it full-time. Whether the VAXes in question are running UNIX
or VMS, or both, TOPS will allow them to act as file servers for Macs and
PCs. Macs and PCs can also serve each other, with the server code running
in the background - it is not neccessary to dedicate a machine to file
service exclusively.
Oh, release dates? Well, the UNIX server has been in beta test for a while
and should be coming out first quarter 1987. The VMS server will almost
certainly be out by second quarter 1987. The Mac and PC versions have been
out since this summer.
As Mike Smith at Apple mentioned, for physical connection the Kinetics
products are a good bet. There are two options, putting the VAXen on
Appletalk using a Kinetics Appletalk Q-Bus card, or using the Kinetics
Appletalk-Ethernet gateway and putting the VAXen on the Ethernet. In 1987,
there will be some other options. The most significant one is ditching
Appletalk, which frankly is just a little bit slow, and going to Ethernet.
Ethernet interfaces are available for the VAX line, there are Ethernet cards
for the PC/XT/AT line, and Kinetics has announced a forthcoming Macintosh
SCSI-Ethernet card, presumably using smart buffering so as not to flood the
Mac, and so probably being a bit pricey. We will be coming out with
compatible TOPS versions, running RFP (our remote function protocol) on top
of the Internet TCP protocol rather than the Appletalk ATP protocol.
Currently UNIX and VMS TOPS connections are not peer-to-peer; they are
server-only modules. In 1987, we have plans to add client functionality to
the UNIX and VMS TOPS implementations. This is not so much to connect UNIX
to UNIX or VMS to VMS, since there are already decent products which do this
and which are fully TOPS compatible, but to connect UNIX to VMS and vice
versa, as well as to all the other operating systems we will be adding in
the next couple of years. (Unlike some other products, TOPS really is an
inter-operating-system network; to the best of my knowledge, we have the
only product that *started* by supporting multiple operating systems. Other
vendors who had single-OS products, but thumped their chests about how they
were really OS-independent, have been having rude awakenings when they
actually started work on other operating systems....)
--
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)berger@datacube.UUCP (11/14/86)
How does something like Tops relate to NFS? There is a product that seems
to cross operating system dependincies.
Bob Berger
Datacube Inc. 4 Dearborn Rd. Peabody, Ma 01960 617-535-6644
ihnp4!datacube!berger
{seismo,cbosgd,cuae2,mit-eddie}!mirror!datacube!berger