Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!touch!mikeh
From: mikeh@touch.touch.com (Mike Haas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: IAC (was Re: Clipboard (was Re: The Amiga's Future))
Message-ID: <243@touch.touch.com>
Date: 15 Jun 91 04:19:34 GMT
References: <1991Jun9.005806.18799@news.iastate.edu| <4264.tnews@templar.actrix.gen.nz| <43@ryptyde.UUCP|
Organization: Touch Communications
Lines: 68

In article <43@ryptyde.UUCP| dant@ryptyde.UUCP (Daniel Tracy) writes:

|I guess this is the standard mentality of Amiga owners who think the extent of
|networking is to make accessing files across a network transparent to apps.
|Ever heard of colaborative computing? Every tried it? There are no applications
|specifically for networking? There are several on the Mac! For instance, in
|a painting program, different users can be editing the same document and see
|each others changes immediately and be able to add their own. There are 
|integrated packages that do this, specialized packages (database, of course, 
|as well as drawing, painting, word processing, etc).

From a networking point of view, what is needed to support such
functionality is called "byte-range locking", and actually has
more useful applications that what mr. tracy suggests.  For example,
multiple-access to databases can be speeded up considerably if
multiple write-accesses can be supported.

And it is my understanding that this is fully supported in 2.0.
Nice going, guys.

And yes, networking is a rapidly expanding industry unto itself...
MUCH MUCH $$$ are going to be made there for umpty-ump years.
e-mail itself is probably the current "apple-of-the-networkers-eye",
currently moving pictures, sounds, voice mail...probably animations/entire
presentations will be mailed around!  (can you imagine, you log into
your system in the morning to a host of commercials?  hmmmm...maybe
we should re-examine this situation...).

Seriously, what the macoid was saying has some truth to it...transparent
file access acfdcross the nets only scratches the surface of what networking
will provide in terms of functionality in the years to come.  And the
mac has always tried to provide it's users with useable (not incredible,
but useable) networking, geared toward being user friendly.

Knowing the mac's architecture, I can tell you that this is no easy feat!
Networking is complex technology with infinite variables and
appletalk has served the mac community well.  It is probably the ONE
SINGLE MAC FEATURE that, if absent, would have prevented the mac from
EVER being considered business-oriented.  It really was too cutesy for
this market, originally targeted as a home/personal machine.  But the
fact that networking was provided really helped with the perception
that networking was a strictly-business application, so they looked
further...some took that "chance"...the rest is history.

I'm actually a little incredulous that networking wasn't considered more in
the original amiga flavor...it was so far ahead in virtually every other
aspect that industry computing requires.  Obviously, as an open system, it
could be added at any time, but in some ways, it would have been much more
important "out-of-the-box" than stereo sound or "genlock-ability" to the
business community.  Folks go thru hoops implementing 3rd-party networking
solutions on the PC, but they HAVE TO DO IT!  The mac gave it to them
turnkey, with provision to switching to faster medium at the click
of an icon (that's how you re-direct the appletalk protocols from the
ho-hum native localtalk, 230kbps to, for example, ethernet at 10Mbps).
In this respect, they have done a nice job.  (too bad the rest of the
OS is so limiting).

Anyway, it's there now, and done very well.  Nice going, guys.

<sigh> but sometimes, I can't help but think that were it there from day 1,
even if some "turtle-slow" C= proprietary implementation (that would
have SCREAMED for 3rd-party improvement), that my company, Touch
Communications, might be providing OSI/X.400 mail gateway technology
for the Amiga, too, and instead or working on Macs and UNIX, i would
be in the "Amiga group".

(We also provide OSI/X.400 solutions for PC's, too...this is what the
industry is forced to deal with!!!).