🚀 go-pugleaf

In <4120@ccicpg.UUCP>, harald@ccicpg.UUCP ( Harald Milne) said:  
>>>	
>>>	Actually, Networking is quite a bit easier to do on the Amiga than
>>>on the macintosh, especially integration into the filesystem. 
>> 	Sorry, I can't buy this one.  
>> The amiga requires extra hardware (=$, probably significant
>> amounts thereof)
>
>	Well for the price of a hard disk, my Amiga has gigabytes of mass
>storage available to me. It's called NFS...

A $500 hard disk?  A $5,000 hard disk?  With appletalk it costs $50.00 
to add a CPU to the network.

>>	There are several network filesystem packages readily available
>>for the mac/appletalk (Tops, AppleShare, others)
>
>	So how about NFS? UNIX? Ethernet? Does appletalk hold a candle?

Might want to check out the products you are flaming before you flame them...

Tops speaks NFS (or will shortly...), talks to UNIX systems (currently).  With 
the Knetics FastPath boxes you can convert AppleTalk cabling to Ethernet 
cabling, or put a mac CPU directly onto ethertalk (via the SCSI port).  
Does ~200,000 baud hold a candle to 10,000,000 baud?  Does a VW Bug hold a 
candle to a Ferrari?  Depends upon whether your objective is to outrun the 
Highway patrol or go to the corner grocery for the least $ to get there.

>>All the Macintosh user has to do is buy the cable and applications he wants
>>plug in the cables and go.
>
>	Perhaps you can tell me what appletalk is good for?

Appletalk is excellent for sharing printers, and for small volume file
transfer and file service.  Appletalk works nicely for e-mail (whether or
not the e-mail programs out there work well for e-mail is another question,
but for messages between a group of 20-30 people, 200,000 baud is perfectly
reasonable).  Appletalk works nicely for other shared devices, like Shiva's
Appletalk modem, or any shared serial devices (or parallel devices) that
might be connected to a box/node on an Appletalk LAN.  And if you really
need performance, go ahead and purchase the Ethertalk cards for your MacII,
and have the speed of the Ferrari.  And if for some reason not all of your
workstations happen to be MacIIs with Ethertalk cards, you can still connect
them to your MacII server (thanks to Knetics).

>>While as a programmer I can laud the extreme
>>modularity of the Amiga System Software which allows me to replace the file
>>system code and easily implement network file systems, the average user
>>really doesn't care, he just wants to be able to get his work done in a
>>consistent environment.
>
>	That's a neat idea if you live in Macland. Who does? Just NFS spoken
>here.

Who 'lives in Macland'?  With some 1.5 million macintosh CPUs out there,
there are far more mac CPUs than UNIX CPUs...  All mac CPUs talk Appletalk.
Far from all UNIX CPUs talk NFS.  And while you may feel that since you
and all the people that *you* work with use strictly NFS that thus by
extension all the world must use NFS, dream on.  Just a few hours ago I
was in a store in Berkeley that had 8 Mac SEs, two LaserWriters, and two
hard drives connected up with AppleTalk and AppleShare 1.1.  I needed to
print out a page that I had on floppy, using MS-Word, which resided on their
server.  So I ran MS-Word remotely over Appletalk, printed the file over
Appletalk, and in 5 minutes I was done, with my output in my hand.  How much
would this have cost on a Unix system running NFS?  How much for the WYSIWYG
word processing software for my one page document?  How much overhead for
the Unix guru to run the system?  How much for the Ethernet boards and
cabling?  *Real* people with *real* tasks don't always need the speed of 
Ethernet and the file service of NFS to do what they need to do.  And if
they need to do what I just described, they'd have a *harder* time doing it
on the Amiga.  I never said that they couldn't.  I never said that it wasn't
possible to construct a system using Amiga workstations that wasn't faster
than Appletalk.  But if someone doesn't need that, then why should they spend
lots of $$ to get it.  

The market realities are proving that a large number of people are doing
just the sorts of tasks I outlined.  This is one of the reasons that the
Macintosh is doing so well.  This is one market segment that the Amiga isn't
doing so well in.  Small wonder.

Peter

Disclaimer:  In my comments on e-mail systems, I don't mean to criticize any
	     of the e-mail software currently available for the macintosh,
	     but merely to point out the Appletalk's ability to handle such
	     relatively small-volume tasks as e-mail service for 20-30 people
	     is purely a function of the 200,000 baud rate, and not a function
	     of any e-mail software in particular.
-- 
 Peter "Arrgh" Korn    korn@apple.com   !hplabs!amdahl!apple!korn    "Hi mom!"