Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!apollo!mishkin
From: mishkin@apollo.uucp (Nathaniel Mishkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: NCS vs NFS+rpc (In Japanese/Kanji)
Summary: "People like to be asked"
Message-ID: <3b7ff47c.13422@apollo.uucp>
Date: 16 Apr 88 17:44:00 GMT
References: <7075@etlcom.etl.JUNET> <3b57a3de.13422@apollo.uucp> <3b66e520.13422@apollo.uucp> <280@eagle_snax.UUCP>
Reply-To: mishkin@apollo.UUCP (Nathaniel Mishkin)
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 43

In article <280@eagle_snax.UUCP> geoff@eagle_snax.UUCP ( R.H. coast near the top) writes:
>In article <3b66e520.13422@apollo.uucp>, mishkin@apollo.uucp (Nathaniel Mishkin) writes:
>> In article <1848@ssc-vax.UUCP> benoni@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) writes:
>> >Sun's ONC architecture has been around for awhile and has a number
>> >of adopting vendors...(Alliant,Apollo, Arete, DEC, Dana, Gould, Harris,
>> >HP, Honeywell, Masscomp, MIPS, NEC, Pyramid, Ridge, SGI, Sony, Stellar,
>> >etc) and universities.
>> 
>> Excuse me if I claim that this list is a bit of hype.
>
>Huh? Apollo has licensed the NFS  trademark and is offering an NFS
>product. I presume (though I haven't checked) that you, like most of the other 
>licensees, supply the programming libraries along with the NFS capability.
>"Adopted" has many interpretations, but this doesn't seem an unreasonable one.
>Certainly it doesn't imply exclusivity.

Come on.  First of all, Sun's marketing brochures don't just say "adopted"
or "adopted NFS".  They say "adopted ONC".  If one is to take the marketing
brochures seriously, "ONC" refers to a grand, panoramic distributed
architecture.  The brochures say "adopt" instead of simply "incorporate
pieces of" because they want to give the impression that people/companies
have accepted the entire architectural approach.  We haven't.  We support
NFS.  We support Fortran too, but I think people would get a funny (and
incorrect) impression of us if we (or others) said we had "adopted
Fortran".

Anyway, the point isn't really what you (or Sun in general) take "adopted
ONC" to mean.  The fact is that (in my humble personal opinion), Sun
would have done well to ask the companies listed in their brochures whether
they had "adopted ONC" before listing them.  No one asked us.

BTW, as far as I know, we don't ship Sun RPC runtime library binaries
as part of our product.  Why should we?  We ship NCS.  (People who for
some reason want Sun RPC have plenty of alternative sources.)  The point
that's most relevant to this discussion is that, for sure, our customers
(understandably) clamored for us to support NFS, so we now do; they haven't
been clamoring for the Sun RPC runtime library.

-- 
                    -- Nat Mishkin
                       Apollo Computer Inc.
                       Chelmsford, MA
                       {decvax,mit-eddie,umix}!apollo!mishkin