mgrant@ebay.sun.com (Michael Grant) (04/04/89)
TOPS does indeed provide the solution you are looking for but not at the expense of 200k. Our NetPrint product will do all that your asking for and only takes around 45k. Michael Grant TOPS Product Marketing
wnn@DSUNX1.DSRD.ORNL.GOV (W. N. Naegeli) (04/11/89)
Michael Grant, TOPS Product Marketing, writes: > TOPS does indeed provide the solution you are looking for but not at the > expense of 200k. Our NetPrint product will do all that your asking for and > only takes around 45k. In our case, Tops NetPrint takes up 48,528 bytes. But it's no use unless you also have a LocalTalk board and drivers installed. Using TOPS FlashTalk card with the dirvers supplied by TOPS (alap and psack [AppleTalk Protocol Stack TSR 2.102]), this takes another 41,904 Bytes for a total of over 90,000 Bytes. That's too much to run several of the latest versions of popular MS-DOS packages on a 640 k machine. For example, to use Freelance, we need to boot with different autoexec.bat files -- a stripped-down version to create and edit drawings, printing them to a postscript file on disk, the reboot with a version that load the network drivers and NetPrint to actually dump the file to the LaserWriter. Needless to say that your are not very productive that way. Of course, we also want to use e-mail. But InBox takes another 100 k. With FlashTalk drivers, NetPrint, and InBox loaded, less than 400 k remains of the 640 k. If you also would like to access a TOPS file server ... just forget it. Even if you install a Rybs HiCard which might give you another 64 or 128 k depending on display adapter in use, you can't build a fully functional network station. Also, the cost of the HiCard (~$350) is far too high for the little memory you gain. Unless someone finds a way of running network services in extended memory, except for say 20 to 25 k within the 640 k range, full access to network services seems to be more a dream than achievable reality. The DOS products sold by TOPS may be useful in specific cases in isolation but not universally and by no means in combination. Please correct me if I am wrong. Even turning a DOS machine into a dedicated TOPS file server is of very limited use because TOPS/DOS, while allowing Macs to access files, does not support the Mac Hierarchical File System, which would be essential for managing more than a trivial number of files. Wolfgang N. Naegeli Oak Ridge National Laboratory wnn@dsunx1.dsrd.ornl.gov (128.219.96.46) (615) 574-6143