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From: mishkin@apollo.UUCP.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Is an Apollo a UNIX box?
Message-ID: <8705271258.AA06047@apollo.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-May-87 08:44:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: apollo.8705271258.AA06047
Posted: Wed May 27 08:44:21 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 29-May-87 01:03:10 EDT
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In-Reply-To: amdcad!bandy@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Andy Beals), fri, 22 may 87 20:52:56

[[Sorry for those of you who are receiving this twice.  The Yale mailer bounced
  a bunch of targets.]]

    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".

This is a little garbled.  There is no IP encapsulation.  Routing through
an internetwork (note that little "i") is handled the way it's been handled
for the last year or so:  using Apollo routers.  The only thing that's
new is we support Ethernet as one of the possible data link types that
can be a network in an Apollo internetwork.  As far as Domain performance,
it is indeed just fine.  As far as TCP/IP goes, one should note that
the most likely reason it's better is that you generally have a route
that's one hop shorter than before (when your node was on the ring and
had an extra hop through a node that was on an ether and a ring).  This
isn't saying that "63%" is wrong, I just think people should understand
the details.

    The "Network Computing System" seems to be mostly vaporware right
    now, but they do seem to have some good ideas.

NCS is NOT vaporware.  (I speak as an engineer working on the project.)
It is fully functioning and in beta test.  I personally have run it on
Apollo, a VAX running 4.3, a Sun running SunOS 3.0, and an Alliant (running
Concentrix [aka 4.2 Unix for Alliants]).  BTW, we have a paper on
NCS at Usenix next month.

                    -- Nat Mishkin
                       Apollo Computer Inc.
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