gts@violet.berkeley.edu (Greg Small) (08/23/87)
Ungermann-Bass has been shipping the NICps/2 for several months, I have one in my hand right now. I believe it is about $ 450 retail. NICs are the "dumb" cards with just the 82586 and memory for buffering. The PC bus card series also includes "intelligent" NIUs with a 6/8 Mhz 186 and 128/256/512k(?) bytes of RAM. We run UBs TCP-PC with Netbios, FTP and TELNET. Along with this we use Greg Minshals TN3270 and IBMs PC LAN. UBs Extended Netbios provides Netbios, TCP, IP, UDP and raw Ethernet access simultaneously and their Lattice and Microsoft Socket libraries provide the basis for porting other applications. We chose the intelligent PC-NIU for our PCs because the TCP/IP code runs on the board. This gives much better performance for file serving and FTP, and the TCP/IP activity and the disk I/O can overlap. Not to be ignored is the important advantage that the TCP/IP code does not take up space in the PC-DOS 640k address space (except about 9k for the Netbios interface). Greg Small (415)642-5979 Personal Computer Networking & Communications gts@jade.Berkeley.EDU 216 Evans Hall CFC ucbvax!jade!gts University of California, Berkeley, Ca 94720 SPGGTS@UCBCMSA.BITNET