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From: HWT@bnr.ca (Henry Troup)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Why Are They Called 'Generics'?
Message-ID: <14843@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 19 Nov 90 15:06:00 GMT
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My friendly competitior foz@ihlpf.att.com (William F Thompson) writes:
 
> I always wondered that too (and I even develop software for them).
> But wonder no more - they're now called Software Releases.
 
Northern Telecom releases generics for SL-1 systems and BCS (Batch
Change Supplement) for DMS and SL-100 systems.
 
DMS software is sold by the 'feature package' so that each piece is
separately charged.  This means that NT builds and delivers individual
loads for each customer switch.  There are a lot of packages, and a
lot of switches, too.
 
George Smyth, one of the original DMS team, and now President of BNR,
once remarked that the DMS loader corrected all the deficiencies of
the SL-1 loader, and if the software were the same size as SL-1, there
would never be a need to globally compile DMS software, or globally
reload it.
 
SL-1 has about 50 software modules in the switching core, DMS has
several hundred.
 
The loader supported relocation and individual reloading of object
modules, which are separately compilable.