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From: markl@ALLSPICE.LCS.MIT.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Workstations, SUPDUPl, Windows...
Message-ID: <8710141451.AA04397@allspice.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 10:51:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: allspice.8710141451.AA04397
Posted: Wed Oct 14 10:51:01 1987
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I've been working on mainframe-processing-vs-workstation-processing
issues for a couple of years now, in the form of the Pcmail
distributed mail system.  Everyone receives their mail at a central
point and reads and modifies it over the network at a workstation.
The question is, how much mail processing is done on the mainframe and
how much at the workstation?  This becomes especially interesting if
your workstations have wildly differing capabilities and some are
unable to perform sophisticated operations like searches or sorts on
their own.  A related problem is how the workstation manages to
communicate efficiently with the mainframe over a 1200 BPS network
connection.  Dave Clark and I spent a fair amount of time designing a
set of operations that minimised packet traffic over slow links, and
placed a minimal computing burden on the mainframe, while not placing
too much of a computing burden on resource-poor workstations.  

markl

Internet: markl@ptt.lcs.mit.edu

Mark L. Lambert
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
Distributed Systems Group

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