🚀 go-pugleaf

> Going around the UK Mailbox network at the moment, is a message from an
> ON IP station who's a beta site for the Gracilis (LL Grace) IP software.

Gracilis wass *not* LL Grace, it was Grace Communications.  One too many Grace's
in the world, that's why the name changed.  LL Grace is alive and well and
still selling satellite and DSP widgets, Grace Communications is now known as
Gracilis, Inc.

> The software is apparently named WERP (Windowed Environment for Packet
> Radio).

This is the preliminary release of the Gracilis version of a NOS with windowed
user interface.  I haven't heard anyone call it "WERP"...  hmmm....  Maybe
"WARP"?  Nahhh....

> The message neglects to mention if WERP has NOS integral, or whether it
> can work with any NOS executable as a program that acts as an interface
> to it. Also, no mention is made of the hardware driver support available
> i.e do you have to have a PacketTen/Twin card installed to use WERP ?

NOS is integral, and doesn't look a whole lot like NOS internally any more.  
Don Lemley and Milt Heath at Gracilis acquired a commercial text-based window
system with source, and heavily modified it to work in a mutli-task 
environment.  They also found and have integrated an overlay manager to deal
with the memory size problems.  Don has spent considerable time finding and
squashing memory leaks, and other problems in NOS.  What they ended up with
is a completely different user interface to a package that does all of what
NOS does, and more.

I've got a copy of the disk, but to be honest, haven't spent much time with
the code.  The neatest features to me are the built-in online command help, 
and the "dialing directory" connection window.  You can build up info about
how to connect to places in much the same way that Procomm works, and then
store that info in the directory so that it's trivial to connect to that
place again.

The complete version is supposed to be out sometime this summer, with user-
friendly configuration screens and context-sensitive help as the big additions
to what is there now.  More than that, I really don't know.

The current driver support is all Gracilis products including the PackeTwin
and PackeTen systems, plus support for all asynch port modes (slip, ax25,
and nrs).  They will probably include more drivers in the next release, but I
don't know.  Email them if you have specific requests...

> Finally, what is the Operating System requirement for running WERP ?

DOS, with little or nothing else loaded.  I don't know what the exact memory
requirements are, but they seem to run 640k machines with some minimum amount
of driver stuff in config.sys.  It works well on 4.77Mhz XT's, and much better
on 33Mhz 386 systems, both of which I've seen in operation before and at 
Dayton.  It pretty much consumes the machine, as all NOS'es do.

> Last but not least, has anyone tried WERP and is it going to appear on
> a machine for anonymous FTP ?

I have a floppy, if noone else beats me to it, I'll try to put a copy on 
col.hp.com this weekend.  The bits are "free", so there's no problem doing that
I don't think.  The only caveat is that I was strongly instructed by Don to
remind everyone whenever questions get asked that this is a *preliminary*
release of the code.  Bug reports and suggestions are welcome at the normal
email address of info@gracilis.com.

Bdale