K312240@AEARN.BITNET (Klaus Kusche) (12/16/88)
Dear Mailing List!
As I received some requests to sum up the results of my enquiry
concerning Apollos and Transputers, here is what I got up to now:
Unfortunately, there are not many e-mails to include directly: I got
most informations by phone or Fax, and of the e-mails I got, the
majority is in German.
1.)
Apollo Switzerland is working on a TDSserver and an afserver, both
integrated into Aegis (that means you can use them on any machine in the
net, even if the T board is in another machine, moreover you have all
the windowing etc.). Moreover, they have improved the TDS user
interface, adding windows (i.e. you get popup and click menues
instead of all the Fkeys and instead of navigating to the Utils fold and
back).
All that is in beta release and should work with any PC board, they
don't offer any hardware for it and use inmos TRAM PC boards internally.
There are no plans yet to use VME boards or to make that run in the
Apollo 10000.
Moreover, they are writing T servers to use the T boards according to
their coprocessor software interface, i. e. you may call the boards from
within your program running on the Apollo. That's still in the dust.
The person to contact is Bruno Boeniger, adress and phone see PVR's
list. He's also looking at other things (Helios, ...), but there are no
concrete plans yet.
2.)
Archipel: Does the same as Apollo, but in a simpler way.
3.)
CSA: No response yet. Seem to have their boards and the LS C compiler
running in Apollos.
4.)
Some people of Siemens West Germany use transputer PC boards and the 3L
C compiler internally, the interesting thing is that they use boards
with no DMA or interrupts (simple polling, the original afserver).
5.)
Many groups or companies expressed their interest in porting other
things (Helios, Trollius, ...) to the combination of Apollo and PC
boards if we want to buy that or cooperate with them, but up to now I
got no info's that such things have already been done. (I agree that
Trollius would perhaps be the best software for the Apollo).
6.)
I didn't look closely at solutions using VME boards in Apollos, because
we don't have VME slots in our machines. This also seems to be a
possible way for the hardware, but there is obviously no software for
that.
7.)
Somebody of the transputer support centre
("AC1GAM@primea.sheffield.ac.uk") tried to e-mail me some info's
concerning Apollo's, but unfortunately he used bytestream format for his
mail, and BITNET didn't split that into records, hence I received only
the first line.
******
Could that please be resent in a readable format!!!!
******
That's all for now, I'll post any additional info's I receive.
Greetings
Klaus Kusche (K312240@AEARN.BITNET).
P.S.:
I've the e-mail adresses of some companies in Great Britain I'd like to
contact, but unfortunately there seems to be no legal way to send mail
to any adresses ending in ".co.uk", the UK gateway refuses to forward
anything to the commercial part of the British net. Some of the
companies are on the UUCP, too, but is there a general, direct, stable
and not-too-illegal way to ".co.uk" nodes from BITNET or ARPANET?
If you know anything about that, *please* tell me!