clp@home.HarvardSq.COM (Charles L. Perkins) (03/13/91)
A few months back, I asked all interested people to write me about SLIP. I received about 150 responses from people needing various flavors of IP connectivity at home, most of them wanting a dial-up variety. Based on these findings (and the year or two I've been pushing NeXT to get SLIP out there :-), I helped convince Marble Associates to produce a real product for the NeXT supporting SLIP. Here's the basic idea: (1) For Gurus and UNIX hackers -- get the copy of 2.0 SLIP floating around in net-land (maybe someone should put it in the archives if it hasn't been along with some instructions on people's experience hacking it to run). (2) For students -- Marble will be selling a special student SLIP for about $100-$120, fully supported and easy to install. (3) For everyone else -- $295 list price, marked down by NeXTconnection to about $240-$250 probably. This includes manuals, support, a U.I. that makes installation and maintenance (if you go between home and work with one NeXT) of your SLIP link trivial. This first version of SLIP will support dial-up, UUCP, modem mixes, etc., and (if they have time) will have some form of header compression. Future versions will up the compression and possibly go to PPP. If you are interested in more information, wait a little while and then write: rick@marble.com or call (617) 891-5555 next month to see how it is going. This is real. It is really happening at last! Charles