kiss@flab.fujitsu.co.jp (Mitsuhiro Kishimoto) (10/09/90)
NeXus Memo NeXT User Society in Japan NeXus Memo Vol. 1 Issue 1 90.9.25 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS 1. About NeXus 2 2. Minutes of First NeXus Meeting 3 3. Minutes of Second NeXus Meeting 4 4. NeXus Activities 5 4.1 Japanese Environment 5 4.2 How to distribute PDS 5 A. NeXus Membership Application 6 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To Contact NeXus (1) e-mail: Internet: NeXus-office@etl.go.jp juice: ohashi@sunrise.ocean.juice.or.jp Nikkei-MIX: shioya NIFTY: PDG03047(Yamada) (2) Facsimile: +81-03-351-0880 (Shioya, SRA, Inc.) (3) Snail mail: NeXus Office c/o Ohashi Clinic 4-4-2, Ebara, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, 142 JAPAN About NeXus NeXus is a non-profit organization to collaborate members, to collect and exchange NeXT and NeXT related information. The main topics we cover are: - Easy to use, superior human interface - Integrated network environment for interpersonal computing - Graphical and multimedia applications - Advanced object oriented programming environment. Our mother ship is a NeXT computer (NeXT station and cube). We, however, will not restrict our activities to NeXT. Other advanced high-tech computers also interest us. We are the first and only NeXT user group in Japan and Asia. One of our principal interests is using Japanese on the NeXT computer. We have local activities in mainly the Tokyo area and our meetings are open to the public. We place our newsletters on worldwide ftp sites to distribute them freely. NeXus is not affiliated with any company. Enthusiastic volunteers support NeXus. We welcome your contributions. NeXus Activities: Meetings: Monthly meetings are held on the 4th Wednesday of each month, from 7:00 p.m. The meetings are open to the public. The guest fee is 1,000 Yen including the latest NeXus Memo. The NeXT meeting will be held on October 24 at SRA Hirakawa-chyo office. Newsletter: We publish a monthly NeXus Memo and quarterly Newsletter. The NeXus Memo will be distributed at every monthly meeting. The first Newsletter is Expected to be published this fall. Special Interesting Groups: We are planning to have several SIGs: Japanese, Mathematica, DSP, Graphics, Mach OS, Programming, Object oriented, Music, etc. If you are interested in any of these, please contact the executive staff. Software Library: Now we are preparing publicly distributable software library on MO disks and Floppy disks. Networks: Currently we run mailing-list (NeXus@etl.go.jp) on JUNET. We are also trying to create a NeXT news group 'fj.sys.next'. Another Activities: To have seminars and symposiums, contact and exchange information with overseas user groups, contact to NeXT Inc., Canon Inc. (distributor in Japan), and other third party developers are also our activities. Executive Committee: Kazunori Shioya: President Katsuhiro Ohashi: Newsletter editor Syuichi Tashiro: Mailing list administrator Yoshio Yamada: Liaison for Nifty serve Mitsuhiro Kishimoto: International liaison Membership: A one year NeXus membership includes four issues of the NeXus Newsletters and 12 monthly NeXus memos. You can pick them up at monthly meetings or if you miss the meeting, can receive them by snail mail. First fiscal year started in October '90 and will end in September '91. Members join NeXus in the middle of the fiscal year would get back issues of NeXus Memos and Newsletters. You also get our software library with only shipping/handling charges. There are four types of memberships: regular, student, overseas, and corporate. An application form for regular, student, and overseas membership may be found at the end of this memo. NeXus Memo: NeXus memo is produced on a NeXT cube with a 330MB harddisk using XNeXT, kterm, nemacs and JLaTex (ASCII version), and is printed on a LaserWriter II NTX-J which has Kanji fonts. The equipment is networked by ethernet and appletalk bridged with FastPath4. 2. Minutes of First NeXus Meeting Written by Kazunori Shioya Translated by Mitsuhiro Kishimoto On July 25, we held the first NeXus meeting in Tokyo under the chairmanship of Mr. Shioya. It started at 7:00 p.m. and ended at 9:30 p.m. Forty people attended. Members came from not only Tokyo area. One came from Kobe and another came from Kyushu! Mr. Shioya first explained that, at first, Canon Software Inc. tried to organize this user group, but we decided NeXus should be independent from any vendor. It means ownership of a NeXT cube is not a condition for membership and more people who have wider interests can attend. He also emphasized the necessity of volunteers to run NeXus. The meeting also discussed regulations, activities of NeXus, and how to distribute PDS and newsletters. Distribution using Mac or MS-DOS format floppy disk was requested by several members. We didn't have enough time for questions and answers or technical discussion, but, we had short demonstrations of Stuart and PS hack by Dr. Tashiro. The monthly meetings are held on the fourth Wednesday. The next meeting will be held on August 22. 3. Minutes of Second NeXus Meeting Written by Katsuhiro Ohashi and Kazunori Shioya Translated by Mitsuhiro Kishimoto August 22nd, 1990 at Canon Inc. NeXT Showroom, Shin Kawasaki Mitsui Building 1. Regulations of User Group Mr. Shioya, chairman of this meeting, explained the philosophy and regulations now being drafted for this user group. He requested questions and comments. 2. Japanese Environment on NeXT Mr. Suzuki, Mr. Kishimoto, and Mr. Mori explained the currently available Japanese environment on NeXT using free software. It included XNeXT (from project Athena of MIT), kterm and wterm (both are localized xterm), Nemacs (Japanese version GNU emacs), Wnn (the most popular kana-kanji translator), mh (mail handler), JTeX (Japanized TeX) and ktops (translator from kanji text to Postscript program). Using the free software, we can read and write Japanese on NeXT now! This is the almost same environment as on SUN WS. Few people are using SMI's own Japanese environment, JLE. Mr. Mori, a graduate student at Tokyo Univ., has ported Nemacs to NeXT and wrote an install procedure memo. Mr. Suzuki of SRA also prepared installation memo and explained how to install Nemacs on NeXT. Mr. Morikawa of Canon Software demonstrated XNeXT, kterm, and Nemacs on NeXT. We plan to add Nemacs sources and binaries to our freeware libraries to distribute them to members. To our surprise only one attendant was interested in installing the Japanese environment we explained. Maybe the others are waiting for the official release of NeXT OS-J or they don't need Japanese (j/k). Probably they must be Japanese shy. There are two versions of JTeX. Only the NTT version of JTeX was reportedly ported to NeXT. The work was done by Dr. Kitagawa of NTT and it was included in our first freeware distribution. But no one has used NTT JTeX on NeXT so far, so the details are still unknown. Japanese OS and DTP software are not yet available. We have to use JTeX for our first newsletter which is due out this fall. (After this meeting, Dr. Kitagawa joined our mailing-list. He will help us a lot.) 3. Network and User Group We can contact members by JUNET or BBS(NIFTY, MIX, etc.). But we should not forget those who cannot be contacted by wire. We are now running mailing-list on JUNET. But the user group and mailing-list are not identical. A person on the mailing-list may not be a member of NeXus and vice versa. Creating a new news group (e.x fj.sys.next) is preferable. But creating a new news group will be tough work on JUNET. We also have to pay attention to copyrights. Most commercial BBS have copyrighted of all articles on their forums. It's not good for us. 4. NeXT meeting NeXT meeting will be held on Sept. 26th at Computer Salon in Gotanda. It will be our formal inaugural meeting. We will also discuss freeware and its distribution. 4. NeXus Activities 4.1 Japanese Environment At the second meeting, we distributed short memos of the Japanese environment written by Mr. Suzuki (SRA, Inc.) and Mr. Mori (student of Tokyo Univ.). Mr. Suzuki explained how to install Nemacs (Japanese version of GNU Emacs) and some currently available software which work with Japanese. Mr. Mori made diff files between Nemacs and GNU Emacs and explained how to install Nemacs using his diff files. The following free software is reported to be running on NeXT. - XNeXT (from project Athena of MIT) - kterm and wterm (both are localized xterm) - jserver (the most popular kana-kanji translator) - Nemacs (Japanese version GNU emacs) These tools enable us to write and read Kanji text on the NeXT computer now. Then we moved to Canon's seminar room which has a big video projector. We showed how to read Japanese on the cube. Under the short time restriction, we could not install the Kanji input method on cube in the seminar room, preventing us from showing how to write Japanese on cube. The big projector is a very impressive tool and makes things very easy to understand. We think it is very useful and should use this hereafter. To our surprise only one attendee was interested in installing the Japanese environment we explained. Maybe the others are waiting for the official release of NeXT OS-J. 4.2 PDS Distribution By Network. (1) make a ftp site on WIDE. (2) make a NeXus dedicated BBS. (3) use commercial BBS. If you can access WIDE, (1) is preferable. (2) is not practical because a typical file size is over one MB. Only small files (e.g., NeXus memo) will be available. By MO copy service (1) MO disk circulation (The first distribution was done this way). (2) MO copy service at NeXus office Only users who have a large harddisk can use (1). (2) may cost about 20,000 yen. By floppy Disk Copy Service May cost 1,000 yen 3.5" 2.88MB NeXT format 3.5" 800KB Mac format 3.5" 720KB MS-DOS format 5.0" 640KB MS-DOS format A. NeXus Membership Application Welcome to NeXus! Please complete the following application. 1. Name :___________________________________________________ 2. Address:_________________________________________________ City:_________________________ State: __________ ZipCode:________ Country: __________________ 3. Method of contact (please prioritize, 1 = highest): ( ) Internet:__________________( ) CompuServe:________________ ( ) Nikkei Mix:________________( ) Fido Net:____________________ ( ) Snail Mail:________________( ) Facsimile:__________________ ( ) other: _____________________ 4. Membership type: ( ) Regular 7,500 Yen/Year, ( ) Student 4,000 Yen/Year ( ) overseas 10,000 Yen/Year (air mail deliverly) 5. Method of payment: ( ) Pay dues to NeXT User Society, Fuji Bank Yotsuya branch (241) Saving account:1642210 NeXT User Society, 4-4-2 Ebara, Shinagawa-Ku, Tokyo 142 (office address needed for deposit) ( ) Pay at the NeXus user meeting. 6. Do you have a NeXT? ( ) Home ( ) Office ( ) I don't have, Harddisk:_____ MB, RAM: _____ MB, Printer: ____________ Daily applications: ______________________________________ 7. What other computers can you use for NeXT's file exchange? ____________________________________________________________ ( ) Can it diplay Kanji fonts? 8. What would you like to do in NeXus? SIG: ________________________________________________________ Volunteer work: _____________________________________________ 9. How can we improve the user group ? 10. Comments and Suggestions: -- Kiss