bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) (05/16/91)
Now that the banns of marriage are posted I'd like to pose a question to the
readers of these groups who work for NCR and AT&T. There are some meetings
coming up in the near future, maybe one/some of you might ask this question
on behalf of those of us who supported each firm by buying their equipment
when they were competitors.
I'd like to know if there will be any effort from the new venture to try
to achieve some interoperability among the products in place when the
merger was consummated. Just a couple of examples. An NCR Tower with Vr3
can not reliably run RFS on a network with an AT&T 3B2. An AT&T 6386 running
Lachman NFS will not cooperate with an NCR Tower. I am not repeating the
groaning that I've already done on each of those examples, I am asking if the
new firm has any interest or concern for the incompatibilities among the
products that they offered when they were competitors.
I'm not so naive as to think that this might interest the suits for whom
yesterday is ancient history. I would be interested (and delighted!) if the
technical contributors who made those products possible might insist that the
past be made as seamless as I'm sure the suits will promise the future. It
can't be all that difficult, a 3B2 gets along just great, RFS, with a 6386;
a Tower gets along just great, NFS, with a Sun. Since they interoperate amongst
several other vendors' products wouldn't it be a nice wedding present (to
those of us who gave them money) for them to interoperate amongst each other?
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Bill Kennedy internet bill@ssbn.WLK.COM or ssbn!bill@attmail.COM
uucp {att,cs.utexas.edu,pyramid!daver}!ssbn.wlk.com!bill