info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (06/28/85)
From: George J. Carrette <GJC@MIT-MC.ARPA> I installed the new Excelan implmenetation, which is in Beta-Test, on my VMS VAX at Lisp Machine Inc yesterday. It works well and the documentation looks great. The interesting thing about this implementation is that most of the hair involved happens on-the-board, so that what the driver presents at the QIO LEVEL are calls such as OPEN_SOCKET, SOCKET_LISTEN, CLOSE_SOCKET, UDP_READ, UDP_WRITE, etc. This is as usual for the other Excelan implementations/board, multibus, Unix, Lispmachine. An extra kick for the VMS product is that the TELNET terminal function is also implemented on the board, and a extra device driver for XXA0:, XXA1:, XXA2: , ... are used instead of the usual TELNET_SERVER_PROCESS feeding from/to a PTY. The downloadable software Excelan delivers now only supports an ETHERNET driver, even though there is an intel SBX bus on the board, onto which one can connect various daughter boards for serial sync, async, parallel, ieee-488 etc.