masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber, Moderator) (05/04/87)
This is the second of many installments summarizing what happened at the 1987 Annual MUS meeting held in Braintree, MA from Tuesday, April 27th until Thursday, April 30th. Initially, I will summarize those things I personnally took notes on. Any other persons who want to submit summaries, please do so. This summary will cover some things about graphics and networking. If someone else can summarize the happenings in the DACP, please send it to me. The big news is X-Window support for V11 from Masscomp. Currently, you can get X-Window V10.4 for the GA800 (19" old color graphics) from MUS User Library. The officially supported version will be V11 and it should be due out "sometime soon". The bad news is that only the GA1000 and the GA600 graphics tubes are being supported in the initial release. We (the users) can influence Masscomp that this might be a bad decision. [The GA600 is the integral graphics processor and the GA1000 used to be called the aurora...]. Call them or write them or send your comments here and I will be sure they get in the newsgroup. More possibly bad news is that X-Window cannot coexist with the current graphics software products (SP-40, SP-41 and SP-43). This may be a small price to pay for the networking and compatibility pluses of X. SP-45 products should be adapatable to work in the X environment. Sue to the concern some showed over X-Window and the GA800, Masscomp may make is possible for GA800 users to upgrade hardware from the GA800 to the GA1000 or something like it. Please call your salesman and tell him/her what you think on this issue. There is a new release of SP-70 (ethernet) in the manufacturing cycle. It should be out by the end of May. It allows you to run the in-kernel version of the networking code with the excelan card so you can increase throughput at the cost of some cpu cycles. For those with 68020 computers, this may make more sense than downloading the code into the Excelan to off-load the 68020. Also, Excelan throughput for those who use the download code has increased from about 90 Kbytes/sec to about 110 Kbytes/second. The number of pseudo ttys has been upgraded from 16 to 64. Broadcase address recognition has been fixed to use official Internet broadcast addresses. On other issues, mmdf and sendmail are being considered as mailer agents that Masscomp will support. If you have strong feelings about which of the two you'd like them to support, let them know. They are looking into supporting other types of networks (like token ring), but nothing concrete can be said at this time. HoneyDanBer UUCP is the next version of UUCP that masscomp will support. No significant changes are anticipated in the masscomp supported UUCP until this is released. It will be released with the next major release of RTU, whenever that is. They are also considering supporting DEC-NET, but not XNS. This is the end of summary 2. If you were there and you disagree with my statements here, please drop me a line. Stan Barber, President Masscomp Users' Society Moderator of comp.sys.masscomp
masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber, Moderator) (05/19/87)
This is the final installment summarizing what happened at
the 1987 Annual MUS meeting held in Braintree, MA from Tuesday,
April 27th until Thursday, April 30th.
Initially, I will summarize those things I personnally took notes on.
Any other persons who want to submit summaries, please do so.
This summary concerns MUS itself.
During the business meeting, new officers were elected.
Stan Barber of Baylor College of Medicine was elected President.
Jim White of The University of Tennessee Space Institute was elected
Vice-President.
Dale Chayes of Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory was elected Secretary.
Tom O'Brian of the U.S. Geological Survey was elected Treasurer.
You can reach Stan electronically as masscomp-request@soma.bcm.tmc.edu.
Dale can be reached at ..!philabs!lamont!dale.
The Editor of MUSings will be Bettina Bair of Cranfield-Phoenix Data
Systems and the Program Chairman of the 1988 Meeting is Ira Gentry, also
of Cranfield-Phoenix. We hope to see the next issue of MUSings in June
and we will have the site and date annoucement of the next international
meeting at that time. Three regional meetings are being planned as well.
One on the West coast, one on the Gulf Coast and one in the Southeast.
We will let you know the specifics once they become known.
A Technical Advisory Commitee was selected to survey the membership
of a "wish list" of items people would like to see Masscomp do in
future releases of software and hardware. You should see a survey out
sometime this summer. Member of this committee include: Keith Knox,
Tony Tinkle and Bob Sailey.
In other news, a group of Masscomp users in France will be forming
a French MUS. They should be having a meeting in October.
This is the end of summary 3. If you were there and you disagree with
my statements here, please drop me a line.
Stan Barber, President
Masscomp Users' Society
Moderator of comp.sys.masscompmasscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber, Moderator) (05/02/88)
This is the second of many installments summarizing what happened at the 1988 Annual MUS meeting held in Danvers, MA from Tuesday, April 19th until Thursday, April 21st. Initially, I will summarize those things I personnally took notes on. Any other persons who want to submit summaries, please do so. Also, opinions expressed are obviously mine. Other opinions are welcome. This one will summarize the new product annoucements most notably the MC6XXX series. Four computers were announced. Three can ship during summer. One will have to wait until fall. All computers annouced use the Motorola 68030 CPU @ 25Mhz. All computers are multiprocessor-capable. All computers are designed to work with the new Super-Lightening Floating Point Chip Set (Described later). All computers have the ability to interface to VME cards. Base prices (for systems, not building blocks) start at $24,900 list. All computers run RTU and can use the DACP front end. All computers support at least the GA1000 graphics. All computers support ECC memory. The CPUs support 64K of cache each and up to 120Mb of high-speed (private memory bus @ up to 26.6 MB/sec) memory. Each CPU comes standard with a 68882 floating point co-processor. The new high end computers are the MC6600 and MC6700 computers. They are built into the same cabinets as the 5600/5700 computers. In fact, owners of the 5600/5700 computers have been able to upgrade their computers to what is in effect a 6600/6700 since last Novemeber when the PEP for that line (PEP-567-30-B) was announced last October. The important new thing annouced here is the support for VME bus in the backplane. According to the marketing data, you can support 30 Multibus and up to 20 (6U) VME cards in the MC6700 and half these numbers in the MC6600. The number of CPUs supported in these computers are 1-3 for the MC6600 and 2 to 5 for the MC6700. When asked why they were supporting fewer CPUs in the high-end MC6700, the reply was lack of power. Representatives of MASSCOMP sensitive to problems with power supplies in previous products (like the 8-slot MC500) stated that the power supplies shipped in all the new computers are capable of handling more cards that in previous products when they were annouced. [They also commented that those customers with power problems should look into some power upgrade options available currently for the MC500-series.] The press release sez "A full comfigured MC6700 system provides maximum performace of 35 million Whetstone instructions per second." These systems support the GA1000 and GA800 graphics systems. The GA600 is not listed on the marketing information. While these two computers strongly resemble the MC5600/5700 computers, the other two computers are the real new technology. The MC6300 and MC6400 (the MC6400 will not ship until fall) are built around a single board computer that is built on a 9U VME card. As such, these computers do not support any Multibus boards without the use of a VME-Multibus bus adapter. [In fact, Masscomp will be shipping MC6300 with graphics boards that are multibus cards with these adapters until the new graphics sub-systems come out.] This single-board computer has can have up to two cpu's, up to 8Mb of parity memory and two super lightening FPA's. It also has ethernet, SCSI, and 4 RS232 ports standard. The MC5300/5400/5500 cannot be upgraded to these computers because of the different bus structures. The MC6300 comes in a pedistal package. The MC6400 comes in a rack-mount package. The MC6400 will support either STD-BUS+ cards in the front or more VME cards. One of the things holding up the shipping of the MC6400 (we are told) is how this part of the packaging will work. The MC6300/MC6400 support only the GA1000 graphics subsystem according to the marketing information. Additionally, two 9U slots on each system can support VME (9U) that match Sun Microsystem's pinout. This means that many cards built for Suns can now be used in a MASSCOMP (not Sun CPU or memory cards, though). The other hardware annoucement of interest was the Super Lightening Floating Point Accelerator. Unlike previous FPAs from MASSCOMP, this is a chip set, not a board. However, it is software compatible with the current Lightening FPA found on the MC5XXX line. As such, applications should port easily. The Super Lightening is $3000 and performs at 7 million Whetstones per second. Super Lightenings only work with the MC68030 CPUs in any of the MC6XXX products. Those who have MC5600/MC5700 who upgrade to MC68030 CPUs can trade in their Lightenings for the new product and pay only $1000. [The older Lightening FPA's will work with the new MC68030-bases CPUs.] For those considering an upgrade or replacement and wish to move disk drives from older systems to these new systems, you should know that some disks supported on the MC5000 series will not be supported on the MC6000 series. Please be sure to check with your sales person before assuming it will be supported. Additionally, in the hardware area, MASSCOMP is moving to a new cartridge table drive for all computers. This tape drive will allow up to 150MB to be stored on one tape. MASSCOMP hopes to start shipping software updates on cartidge tape at some point. When asked if MASSCOMP would upgrade all the older cartridge tapes currently on the MC5XXX in the field, the answer was "We don't know." Owners of MC5XXX should probably voice there opinion about this issue to their nearby sales person. [The new tape drive is called the ST-8 (Cabinet) or the PT-8 (Pedistal) or the TD-150 and costs $2100 and is actually cheaper than the older 45MB 1/4-inch tape (PT-2 or TD-Q6400 @ $2500). If you are ordering a new system, get the new tape drive.] This is the end of summary 2. If you were there and you disagree with my statements here, please drop me a line. Stan Barber, Immediate Past President Masscomp Users' Society Moderator of comp.sys.masscomp