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From: bandy@amdcad.AMD.COM (Andy Beals)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Is an Apollo a UNIX box?
Message-ID: <16784@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: Fri, 22-May-87 20:52:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdcad.16784
Posted: Fri May 22 20:52:56 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 23-May-87 18:02:18 EDT
References: <870520222712.854845@HI-MULTICS.ARPA> <1734@zeus.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: bandy@amdcad.UUCP (Andy Beals)
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, Ca.
Lines: 37

In article <1734@zeus.TEK.COM> bobr@zeus.UUCP (Robert Reed) writes:
>Apollo currently is NOT a UNIX box.  

Agreed.

>Rumors abound
>that SR-10 of the Apollo system will be a "true" UNIX, implemented at the
>kernel level.  We wait to see.

Our Apollo salesdroid was out today with his dog and pony show about "Native
Ethernet, Unix Update and Network Computer System".

The "native ethernet" is a 3-com(?) card that goes into the "at slot".  They
claim that while it's still a hair slower at getting data between Domain-Ring
members, their engineering folks can't really tell the difference between
Domain-Over-Ethernet and Domain-on-a-Ring.  That's right, they're saying that
if they run Domain-Over-Ethernet, it not only runs at the same speed, they
encapsulate the Domain packets within IP packets so you can squirt them across
gateways - but only T1 links, 56kbps is too slow.  They were also claiming
that TCP/IP throughput is 63% better with the "native ethernet".

He also said that with SR-10, Aegis will exist for backwards compatability
reasons and that Unix will be the base of their system.  I'll believe that
when I see it.

The "Network Computing System" seems to be mostly vaporware right now, but
they do seem to have some good ideas.  Basically they're willing to hand out
standard interfaces to subroutines that could be on remote machines.  They
have servers for deciding what machines to poll for certain subroutines and
also a couple other functions.  

They didn't say anything about compiler improvements.  They also made a face
when I asked when they were going to start supporting NeWS.

	andy
-- 
Andrew Scott Beals, {lll-crg,decwrl,allegra}!amdcad!bandy +1 408 749 3683