Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!convex!linac!midway!zaphod!francis From: francis@uchicago.edu (Francis Stracke) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: 7.0 CAN pipe (was Re: System 7.0 vs. NeXT Step) Message-ID: Date: 30 Jan 91 20:53:12 GMT References: <19566@shlump.nac.dec.com> Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator) Organization: Mathematics Department, University of Chicago Lines: 31 In-Reply-To: minow@bolt.enet.dec.com's message of 29 Jan 91 17:21:02 GMT In article <19566@shlump.nac.dec.com> minow@bolt.enet.dec.com (Martin Minow) writes: -- It doesn't appear to be trivial to write a package that supports PPC Toolbox on System 7, but defaults to AppleTalk (ATP, probably) on earlier systems. It's obviously possible, but it might be a fair amount of work with little payback. In general, I think that PPC Toolbox (and AppleEvents) offer a number of advantages over Unix pipes, and might prove to be the most significant new feature of System 7. What about ADSP? Is there an equivalent of that in the PPC Toolbox? If you just supported that on both Sys7 and on earlier systems with AppleTalk, you'd have a very nice form of pipe: creatable between any 2 processes, on different nodes, etc. If there were a bunch of such plug-and-play piping programs, you could (possibly) establish a hypercomputer on your net. Or you could just have a truly wonderful extension of Unix's strictly linear in-shell pipes. (Def.: A hypercomputer is a system of sharing out unused resources of machines on a net to simulate an extra computer. The factorization that was done by Email last year was an example of a hypercomputer job.) -- /=============================================================================\ | Francis Stracke | My opinions are my own. I don't steal them.| | Department of Mathematics |=============================================| | University of Chicago | Until you stalk and overrun, | | francis@zaphod.uchicago.edu | you can't devour anyone. -- Hobbes | \=============================================================================/