Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!bionet!bcm!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!think.com!hsdndev!husc6!Frodo.MGH.Harvard.EDU!Cherry From: Cherry@Frodo.MGH.Harvard.EDU (J. Michael Cherry) Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank Subject: Re: A question for FTP users Message-ID: <5464@husc6.harvard.edu> Date: 25 Jan 91 03:19:13 GMT References: Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu Organization: Molecular Biology, Mass. General Hospital Lines: 34 In article kristoff@GENBANK.BIO.NET (Dave Kristofferson) writes: > The people at NCBI will be running the next GenBank contract > and have it in their charter to develop standards. I would hope that > they would comment on these issues. NCBI has already held developers > meetings on their proposed ASN.1 standard which I hope people are > anticipating. Please forgive my nitnicking that follows but I'd hate to see things get more confused. This is not directed to Dave's posting I just quoted it so you would see were things start. The NCBI proposed database standard is built using a transaction/notation standard called ASN.1. ASN.1 has been adopted by several commercial computer and software companies for a variety of applications. ASN.1 is not the name of the NCBI standard. I believe the NCBI refers to the database format by the name of their nascent database - GenInfo Backbone. You can retrieve a copy of the the GenInfo Backbone format version 0.5 via anonymous ftp from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Look in the toolbox/asn_0.5 directory. One more little point if I may. Several people have referred to "mainframe" computers in this discussion of formats. A mainframe computer is a very large computer typically produced by IBM. There are few if any dedicated mainframe computers run for molecular biologist. However Digital's VAX computers - generally called mini computers are everywhere. However, currently most all the computers being sold by Digital, Sun Microsystems, HP, Apple and even IBM are microcomputers. Sun and others may call them supermicros - but that is just marketing. Mike Cherry cherry@frodo.mgh.harvard.edu Department of Molecular Biology Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston 617-726-5955