Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!wesommer
From: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: NCS vs NFS+rpc (In Japanese/Kanji)
Message-ID: <4673@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 16 Apr 88 20:12:49 GMT
References: <7075@etlcom.etl.JUNET> <3b57a3de.13422@apollo.uucp> <3b66e520.13422@apollo.uucp> <280@eagle_snax.UUCP> <3b7ff47c.13422@apollo.uucp>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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The cause of the recent dispute between Nat Mishkin and Geoff Arnold
is reminiscent of another goof by Sun's marketing which occurred
almost two years ago.

At the time, I was working as a summer intern for Jim Gettys at
MIT/Project Athena; he and Bob Scheifler (among others) were working
on the preliminary design of X version 11, and were also in the
process of attempting to make it as widespread as possible.  NeWS was
just beginning to rear its head out of Sun.  Some Sun marketing person
put out a press release claiming that MIT was dropping X in favor of
NeWS.  JG & RWS were understandibly very upset about this.
Fortunately, they complained loudly enough that Sun sent out a
retraction of the press release.

I guess Sun does marketing by claimed peer pressure:  "Everyone else
is using our stuff, why aren't you?".  

As a side note: MIT/Athena uses NFS, mostly because it's a defacto
industry standard.  We'd rather be using an architecture more like
CMU's Vice filesystem, but at the point in time when we had to commit
to a particular filesystem type, Vice wasn't really in shape to be
imported by us.  We don't use Yellow Pages, because it's a crock (we
have our own user registration database/name server which has much
lower overhead, and which is easier to administer).  If asked, I would
certainly deny that we had "adopted ONC".

					- Bill