clp@wjh12.harvard.edu (Charles L. Perkins) (11/26/90)
I have been running a pre-release version of SLIP on the NeXT for a long time now, and for political and source-code-restriction reasons (not due to NeXT but due to others) this version of SLIP was never and will probably never be made available to the NeXT community as a whole. I have been pushing on "all the right people" at NeXT to try to make SLIP happen for everyone, and have offered to build and/or contribute ideas to the new user interface NeXT has been working on for SLIP. I have also been pushing on the company where I'm working to do a version of SLIP, and NeXT has been supportive in that effort, but my company needs to have a more certain feeling for how many people need SLIP. Here is the basic situation as I know it today: (1) NeXT will NOT be releasing SLIP for 1.0 or for 2.0. They are focusing mostly on providing advanced solutions (like PPP) for later versions of the system. (Note that this means my efforts of the past year come to nought.) (2) NeXT knows how many people want SLIP and are actively encouraging me and my company to write SLIP ASAP. I want to, and so does my company, but... (3) I don't know how many of you would really buy SLIP if it were out there, and my company wants to know more about the $s and cents of all this. So if you can take a minute, please reply to me at one of the below addresses and tell me what you'd like (hardwired/leased-line SLIP, dial-up SLIP, etc....for 1.0 or for 2.0) and whether you'd pay for it. Responses now may actually cause SLIP to exist on the scale of weeks, so make your feelings known! Thanks, Charles L. Perkins (Reg Dev at Large) clp@marble.com clp@home.HarvardSq.com