ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (06/09/89)
This posting is to announce that the BETA release of ISIS V12 is now available to the general public. Unlike the ALPHA release, we feel that the BETA release is relatively sound. In principle, you should be able to just roll this in on your SUN3, SUN4, MIPS (!), HP300, HP800, GOULD, NEXT (*or other MACH releases *), or APOLLO system, compile it and run it. We are still working on the Lucid LISP port, but Allegro is solid now and included on the release. The "BYPASS" code (which gives the much announced 10-fold speedup in most kinds of broadcasts) is not working well enough for general use yet. It is disabled in the distribution. In practice, we have only tested a subset of these systems and a subset of the available OS releases, so some of you should definitely expect "surprises". Hopefully, not too many of you and not too extreme a surprise. If you have already filed an ISIS user form, you will know what machine and account number we use for distributions of ISIS. The V12 release is located in the same place as our prior releases, in the following files: pub/ISISV12.TAR pub/ISISV12.TAR.Z pub/ISIS-DOC.dvi pub/ISIS-DOC.dvi.Z Use ftp in binary mode to copy these files; copy the compressed ones if at all possible please. Those of you who prefer to copy from UUNET can also obtain ISIS using UUCP. However, you may not find the V12 files there for a little while. I need to contact the person who has helped on this in the past and ask that he transfer the stuff again. If it seems that I am being a bit obscure about this, the problem is that I can't just tell people where to copy the stuff from, because of a US Dept. of Commerce restriction on this type of software. We will be happy to give you access to ISIS provided that you complete our request form, however. We are tooling up to produce new copies of the manuals, etc. The dvi version can be printed directly, of course, and we will provide the figures free of charge. We will also make tapes and cassettes. As for the V11 release, we need to charge for these. We will sell you a tape for $50, or make a tape/cassette if you supply us the materials for $20. These fees are strictly to cover our costs. Manuals will be available for $15/copy (they are larger than the old version and hence cost more for us to reproduce and mail). As with the previous versions of ISIS, you may email requests to schiz@cs.cornell.edu for this sort of thing. Bug reports can be mailed to isis-bugs@cs.cornell.edu. As for ideas for ISIS applications, complaints about our system interface or design, questions about what people are using ISIS for out there -- I would like to see a bit of dialog started in this group on those topics, so please post your messages and we'll see what comes of it. An updated copy of the V12 release notes follows in a separate posting.