davidf@sgi.UUCP (David Fenstemaker) (07/29/88)
Dear Mr. John Pershing, IBM Research, Yorktown, Obviously, you are a pretty knowledgable guy. Especially bright was the way you posted the LU6.2 information without giving away your mail location on the net. Anyway, listen to my plea if you have a minute. I'm the manager of a group of engineers at Silicon Graphics, (we make unix based graphics workstation that are considered about the state of the art for such things), who specifically create IBM connect products, (both the hardware and software). So far we have built a 3270 coax emulator, a 5080 emulator, and are working on a SNA server product. We would like to always engineer our workstation connectivity products in a way that would always fit the IBM architecture, meaning for instance, our SNA server would be a PU2.1 node, pass alerts to NETVIEW, to be managed by IBM's network management software, and in general have our products "fit" where they are supposed to. Other vendors do things like PU5, offer competing network management software, and in general kind of screw up the architecture of the network in general. It seems like it would be in IBM's best interest to assist vendors who would like to "fit" rather than "botch up" IBM customer networks, leaving the control of the net to the IBM hosts, and just playing in their nitch. IBM branch people are not quite what they used to be technically, so, mostly we spend alot of time reverse engineering and trying to get it right. Does IBM have some way of assisting vendors who want to be true Blue? What I'm looking for are documents to help us design our product the right way. We don't compete with you guys...somebody who just wants to run CATIA isn't going to buy a $50K 10 MIP workstation with a 5080 emulator. He might want to download an IGES file created on CATIA and render the image or something, so he needs to display the image first, to make sure it is what we wants. You guys don't make a workstation product for the engineering marketplace. (You got to admit the RT ain't there yet). I have been on both sides of the fence, and if the customer is happy both IBM and the vendor look good. If IBM gives the vendor trouble, the customer just feels betrayed by IBM, and learning that fact would help boost IBM sales in the long run, and prevents the vendor from trying to get the customer to get rid of all the Blue gear so he can survive. Well, let me know if us little guys have friends some where... David Fenstemaker davidf@sgi.com
LDW@USCMVSA.BITNET (Leonard D Woren) (07/29/88)
> Obviously, you are a pretty knowledgable guy. Especially bright was > the way you posted the LU6.2 information without giving away your mail > location on the net. Wrong. Look carefully at ALL the header lines from the original posting. It does give his network address. It's just that he probably used the IBM CMS NOTE command, which hasn't heard of RFC822, and LISTSERV doesn't deal with the "userid AT node" format in the From: generated by NOTE. When, oh when, are people posting to the network going to use decent software to do it???