🚀 go-pugleaf

marty schoffstall of RPI writes (flames?):

> How about protocols (xns) that historically have not been
> placed in the public domain so people could implement them.

While this may have been "historically" true, it's not true now.
Xerox seems anxious and eager for other people to use XNS.  They
even run something called the Xerox Systems Institute to help
them do it.  I believe that BSD 4.3 Unix supports XNS as well as
TCP/IP.  3Coms ethernet stuff for IBM PCs is based on XNS and
you can get a package for the PC that allows you to use XNS mail,
file and print servers.

> Would you like your favorite machine with large disks to file serve for them

Reference is made in the documentation to file services under Unix and VMS.
In fact, a Vax supports LEAF, which is arguable a better protocol since
it supports random access, which, as schoffstall correctly points out,
the current NS file servers do not.  (It's said to be in the next
release, due out this spring.)  (I should point out that the
documentation I'm refering to is the Interlisp release notes, so this
may not apply to Viewpoint or XDE, which I don't use.)

> We have had two of these machines at RPI for a long time and so far
> I have been unimpressed.

I have a dandelion (an 8010 or 1108) sitting on my desk, and I'm
not unimpressed.  It's by no means perfect, but it's also not as
bad as schoffstall seems to think.

It should be noted that the MIT Sloan School is
the recipient of a grant from Xerox, so I could be accussed of being
biased in their favour.  I still like the machine though and think
that many of schoffstall's comments are either out of date or based on
dislike rather than hard fact.
-- 

Kevin Crowston				UUCP: {seismo,ut-sally}!harvard!kevin
MIT Sloan School of Management		ARPA: kevin@xv.mit.edu or
					      kevin@harvard.arpa