manglik@bgsuvax.UUCP (Pankaj Manglik) (10/05/89)
I am looking for some information about 'COURIER' which is the rpc package as specified by XEROX. Can anyone tell where I might be able to find such info. Thanks. Pankaj Manglik
LVARIAN@PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU ("Lee C. Varian") (10/07/89)
On Thu, 5 Oct 89 01:04:54 GMT Pankaj Manglik said: >I am looking for some information about 'COURIER' which is the rpc package >as specified by XEROX. Can anyone tell where I might be able to find >such info. Thanks. > >Pankaj Manglik Xerox standards documents may be ordered from Xerox Systems Institute at the following address: Xerox Corporation 475 Oakmead Parkway Sunnyvale, CA 94086 Attn: Xerox Systems Institute MS: SVHQ 4 (408) 737-4652 I think the manual you want is "Courier: The Remote Procedure Call Protocol", Dec. 1981, XNSS 038112, $20. A Xerox Literature Catalog is available free. Lee Varian Princeton University
jqj@RT-JQJ.STANFORD.EDU (JQ Johnson) (10/09/89)
Courier is documented in Xerox System Integration Standard XSIS 038112, December 1981. Courier: The Remote Procedure Call. Appendix F, Bulk Data Transfer, is an October 1982 appendix. Courier is heavily used as the standard for most of Xerox's network development on top of XNS transport. However, the individual uses of Courier are not well documented: some RPC sets (e.g. Clearinghouse) are described in their respective XSIS documents; others (e.g. the virtual terminal access protocol) are not to my knowledge externally documented. Xerox originally handcoded all Courier applications, so there were some ambiguities in the spec and some variations between documented interfaces and actual use. I was the author of one of the first (almost) complete XNS Courier compilers (for 4.3BSD); since that time, I believe a number of other Courier compilers have been developed inside Xerox for various software environments. By the way, a Courier subset compiler was developed by Eric Cooper and distributed as part of 4.2BSD. It used TCP streams as the transport. Many of Courier's ideas saw a wider audience as they were borrowed by later RPC languages, e.g. Sun's RPC and ASN.1. JQ Johnson voice: 415-723-3078 Manager, Special Projects Internet: jqj@jessica.stanford.edu Networking and Communications Systems Pine Hall Rm 125-A Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-4122