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From: masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber, Moderator)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.masscomp
Subject: Summary of Masscomp Users' Society Annual Meeting part 2
Message-ID: <3067@soma.bcm.tmc.edu>
Date: Mon, 4-May-87 01:51:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: soma.3067
Posted: Mon May  4 01:51:59 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 5-May-87 05:46:05 EDT
Organization: Masscomp Users' Society
Lines: 67
Approved: masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu

This is the second of many installments summarizing what happened at
the 1987 Annual MUS meeting held in Braintree, MA from Tuesday,
April 27th until Thursday, April 30th.

Initially, I will summarize those things I personnally took notes on.
Any other persons who want to submit summaries, please do so.

This summary will cover some things about graphics and networking.
If someone else can summarize the happenings in the DACP, please
send it to me.

The big news is X-Window support for V11 from Masscomp. Currently,
you can get X-Window V10.4 for the GA800 (19" old color graphics)
from MUS User Library. The officially supported version will be
V11 and it should be due out "sometime soon". The bad news is that
only the GA1000 and the GA600 graphics tubes are being supported
in the initial release. We (the users) can influence Masscomp that
this might be a bad decision. [The GA600 is the integral graphics
processor and the GA1000 used to be called the aurora...]. Call them
or write them or send your comments here and I will be sure they
get in the newsgroup.

More possibly bad news is that X-Window cannot coexist with the
current graphics software products (SP-40, SP-41 and SP-43). This
may be a small price to pay for the networking and compatibility
pluses of X. SP-45 products should be adapatable to work in the
X environment.

Sue to the concern some showed over X-Window and the GA800, Masscomp
may make is possible for GA800 users to upgrade hardware from the 
GA800 to the GA1000 or something like it. Please call your salesman
and tell him/her what you think on this issue.


There is a new release of SP-70 (ethernet) in the manufacturing cycle.
It should be out by the end of May. It allows you to run the in-kernel
version of the networking code with the excelan card so you can increase
throughput at the cost of some cpu cycles. For those with 68020 computers,
this may make more sense than downloading the code into the Excelan
to off-load the 68020.

Also, Excelan throughput for those who use the download code has increased
from about 90 Kbytes/sec to about 110 Kbytes/second. The number of pseudo
ttys has been upgraded from 16 to 64. Broadcase address recognition has
been fixed to use official Internet broadcast addresses.

On other issues, mmdf and sendmail are being considered as mailer
agents that Masscomp will support. If you have strong feelings about
which of the two you'd like them to support, let them know.

They are looking into supporting other types of networks (like
token ring), but nothing concrete can be said at this time.

HoneyDanBer UUCP is the next version of UUCP that masscomp will
support. No significant changes are anticipated in the masscomp
supported UUCP until this is released. It will be released
with the next major release of RTU, whenever that is.

They are also considering supporting DEC-NET, but not XNS.


This is the end of summary 2. If you were there and you disagree with
my statements here, please drop me a line.

Stan Barber, President
Masscomp Users' Society
Moderator of comp.sys.masscomp