---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash SunFlash February 1992 Table Of Contents SunFLASH Vol 38 #toc February 1992 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note From The SunFlash Editor Summary of The Florida SunFlash For New Subscribers Summary Of February's Messages (line count + title) Summary of Messages Sent This Month (issue # and synopsis) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note From The SunFlash Editor There is a compressed tar file of all of the 1991 articles (291 articles, about 1.25Mb. About 4Mb when uncompressed.) on all of the archive servers. There are compressed tar files for each month as well as the whole year. newstop.ebay.sun.com (Sun access only) paris.cs.miami.edu pub/sunflash solar.nova.edu pub/sunflash src.doc.ic.ac.uk sun/sunflash uunet.uu.net systems/sun/sunflash ftp.adelaide.edu.au pub/sun/sunflash If you find material that would make a good SunFlash article, please send it to me for consideration and I'll post it. Remember that you can suppress the excess mail headers in most mail programs by adding a line to your .mailrc file thus: ignore 'Resent-From' 'X-Mailer' 'Errors-To' 'Newsgroups' 'Message-Id' 'Resent-Message-Id' 'Apparently-To' 'In-Reply-to' 'reply-To' 'References' 'Via' 'Status' 'Received' 'Return-Path' 'Precedence' 'X-Lines' If you want a copy of an article that you missed, please send the volume.issue (e.g. 37.00 for this article) to flash@sunvice.east.sun.com John J. McLaughlin System Engineer & SunFlash Editor Ft. Lauderdale, Florida USA March 9th, 1992 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Summary of The Florida SunFlash For New Subscribers The Florida SunFlash is an electronic news service for Sun Microsystems computer users. It is distributed by more than 90 Sun offices and by about 40 Sun Local Users Groups in more than 35 countries. The Florida SunFlash has a subscription base of more that 50,000 Sun users. This is the February table of contents for the Florida SunFlash. If there are any items that you missed and really want to see, please send the required volume.issue numbers to flash@sunvice.East.Sun.com. For more information about SunFlash, send mail to info-sunflash thus: $ mail info-sunflash@sunvice.East.Sun.COM Subject: info info ^D $ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Summary Of February's Messages -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Line Count Vol.# Title 129 38.01 SMCC,Motorola Introduce SBus Chips 109 38.02 CICS On UNIX 538 38.03 KHOROS 34 38.04 Corrections (EZ-admin and Khoros) 127 38.05 Partners Support Open Graphics Initiative 60 38.06 Prime Time Freeware, (January, 1992) 104 38.07 SMCC Partnership With Evans & Sutherland 481 38.08 Third Party Product Announcements 116 38.09 Zen and the Art of the Internet 152 38.10 NetWare Concurrency and PC-NFS 106 38.11 State,Local Governments To Workstations 77 38.12 SPARCstation IPX-424 95 38.13 SMCC and P.INK Sign Reseller Agreement 88 38.14 Silicon Graphics To Ship ToolTalk 87 38.15 Momentum Continues For SunSoft's ToolTalk 195 38.16 Macintosh Emulation For SPARC machine 108 38.17 Technical Books Review Newsletter 106 38.18 USENET News Available on CD-ROM 245 38.19 USENIX 92 Winter Conference Proceedings 97 38.20 Sun Microsystems: One Smart 10-Year-Old 129 38.21 Sun Delivers Best TPC-A Price/Performance Total 3183 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Summary of Messages Sent This Month -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 38.01 SMCC And Motorola Introduce New SBus Interface Chips SMCC = Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation. -johnj ANAHEIM, Calif. --February 4, 1992-- Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC) and Motorola Inc. today introduced at BUSCON WEST two new SBus interface controllers, the SBus Goldchip(TM) and the SBus SLIC(TM). With these new devices, developers of systems and add-in cards for SBus-based workstations and servers will no longer have to design the interface between their products and the system SBus controller. SBus is a high-performance, modular I/O interconnect that was designed by SMCC and made available to the industry with no licensing restrictions, design fees or royalties. There are currently 260 SBus cards available from more than 100 vendors. The new chips are fully compliant with the SBus specification, so that SBus system and card developers who use them in their designs can concentrate on creating more specialized products rather than on interface protocols. This improves productivity, lowers manufacturing costs and speeds time-to-market. Designed by SMCC, the chips will be manufactured, marketed and supported worldwide by Motorola. The SBus Goldchip is the industry's first general-purpose, 64-bit direct memory access (DMA) interface chip for a RISC bus architecture. Anticipating increased bandwidth requirements from I/O devices, the SBus Goldchip implements SBus specification Revision B.0, which allows 64 bits of data to be transferred with each clock cycle. This results in a sustainable bandwidth of up to 160 megabytes per second. The SBus Goldchip is an SBus master device that can initiate data transfers on the bus to any other device. 38.02 CICS On UNIX This is a third party press announcement that is interesting. -johnj SUN to open up IBM's "Glass House" market with VIS/TP CICS Compatible SUN servers to penetrate IBM's proprietary mainframe OLTP market DALLAS, TX., January 22, 1992 -- VISystems Inc. today announced they have signed a porting agreement with Sun Microsystems for the VIS/TP - Transaction Processing System product line, known as "CICS ON UNIX", to Sun workstations and servers. The port gives Sun the capability to increase sales of its high end servers, as "IBM mainframe-compat ible" distributed platforms, to Fortune 1000 companies. 38.03 KHOROS This is an announcement about a publicly available image processing (and more) project from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Ftp and mail instructions are included. -johnj AN ENVIRONMENT FOR INFORMATION PROCESSING, DATA VISUALIZATION, AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT THE KHOROS PROJECT The main goal of the Khoros software project is to create and provide an integrated software development environment for information pro- cessing and data visualization. The Khoros software system is now being used as a foundation to improve productivity and promote software reuse in a wide variety of application domains. A powerful feature of the Khoros system is the high-level, abstract visual language that can be employed to significantly boost the productivity of the researcher. 38.04 Corrections (EZ-admin and Khoros) Two corrections: It should be noted the corrected that the number for Pacific Access the company that carry's EZ-admin is (800) 742-8282 not 800-628-6161. Khoros is NOT a public domain system. It is an open environment and is restricted by a copyright. Those who obtain Khoros are bound by the University of New Mexico copyright notice. The Khoros project is supported via the Khoros Consortium whose members have rights over and beyond those stated by the copyright. 38.05 5 Graphics Partners Show Support Of SMCC's New "Open Graphics" Initiative SMCC's Objective to Give Users A Broad Array of Graphics Options MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --January 27, 1992-- Five of the graphics partners of Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC) --DuPont Pixel Systems, Evans & Sutherland, Nth Graphics, VICOM Visual Computing and Visual Information Technologies Inc. (VITec) --are demonstrating commitment to SMCC's new "open graphics" initiative by announcing new products. The initiative echoes SMCC's open systems strategy of encouraging the creation of a broad selection of SPARC(R)/Solaris(R) systems from many different vendors. With open graphics, SMCC is moving on several fronts to facilitate the development of a wide range of graphics products that are easily integrated into the SPARC/Solaris platform. As a result, users will have many more graphics solutions that can be tailored to meet their specific needs, thus giving them lowered cost and greater functionality. 38.06 Prime Time Freeware, (January, 1992) Prime Time Freeware, Volume 1, Number 1 (January, 1992) This is an announcemenyt from cfcl!rdm@apple.com (Rich Morin) -johnj The first issue of Prime Time Freeware (PTF) is now available. It contains over 1500 MB of UNIX-related source code, stored as compressed tar(1) files on an ISO-9660 CDROM. A 50+ page booklet introduces and explains the disc. The issue contains recent versions of over 100 packages, including: Andrew (windowing code) Athena (except Kerberos) CLU comp.sources.{amiga,3b1,games,x,sun,unix} Epoch GNU (current and vintage versions) Icon InterViews ISODE Kermit (tapes A-E) Mach NCSA Data Analysis Code Scheme Serpent T Utah Rendering Toolkit X11R5 The disc and booklet are available from: Prime Time Freeware 415-112 N. Mary Ave., Suite 50 Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA (408) 738-4832 38.07 SMCC Partnership With Evans & Sutherland Companies to Develop High-End Graphics Products for SPARC Platform MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --January 27, 1992-- Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC) and Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation (E&S), a leading manufacturer of high-performance 3-D graphics products, have signed a joint agreement under which E&S will develop new, sophisticated graphics accelerators for SMCC's SPARC(R) systems. These will be the first E&S products for SPARC systems running the Solaris(R) distributed computing evironment and will extend SMCC's current graphics product line. The new E&S graphics accelerators will be software-compatible with workstations currently available from both SMCC and E&S. For SMCC, the new graphics products will be compatible with 3-D applications written using Sun's XGL(TM), SunPHIGS(TM), Xlib and PEXlib graphics software libraries, as well as the 3,840 current independent solutions for SPARC platforms. Software compatibility from E&S will include the high-end 3-D graphics E&S applications such as CDRS(TM), SYBYL(R), AVS(TM) and other applications written using ES/PEX(TM). 38.08 Third Party Product Announcements This article contains 5 third party products/services. -johnj Crescendo Ships First FDDI LAN Using Unshielded Twisted Pair GAINEXPOSURE LUCID LAUNCHES ADVANCED C++ AND C PROGRAMMING SYSTEM FOR SPARC EPC Modula-2 Compiler Network Traffic Generator added to NetMetrix toolset 38.09 Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide This article from Brendan Kehoe describes an excellent introductory guide to the Internet. It can be ftp-ed from the internet. I will send a uu-encoded, compressed postscipt version to anyone who wants a copy but lacks internet access. (I'd rather not as the uu-encoded, compressed postscipt is just over 262k.) -johnj I'd like to announce the availability of the first edition of booklet that I hope will find a wide-spread audience. It's called ``Zen and the Art of the Internet'', and serves as an introductory text to using the Internet in its various incarnations. In approximately 100 pages, Zen addresses domain names, electronic mail, telnet and ftp, and a variety of other topics. An extensive glossary and fairly decent bibliography are also included. This booklet explicitly avoids being oriented towards one specific operating system or computing environment. It's not Unix-heavy, nor does it directly address VMS or any other OS. Rather, it provides the fundamental concepts and ideas behind using the Internet, and leaves the specific details of command options and usage to the local site. Directors of academic computing services departments for universities and colleges are encouraged to make copies for their user communities; system administrators are welcome to offer it to their users, whether the system be private, commercial, or public; any companies in need of training or other educational literature may use this booklet as an aid; and, most of all, "normal users" are invited to use it to help expand their knowledge of the Internet and the possibilities it offers. The author is keenly interested in hearing from anyone considering large distribution; if you're going to do such a thing, please drop me a line just to satisfy my curiosity. 38.10 NetWare Concurrency and PC-NFS This is an article by a Sun PC-NFS guru, Mike Marotta. It answers a frequently asked question: how can a DOS PC access a Sun/NFS server and a Novel Netware server simultaneously ? -johnj One of the more interesting and useful configuration options available in PC-NFS 3.5 is the ability to run multiple protocols simultaneously. This is done via the NDIS driver. NDIS allows multiple protocols to share a single network interface card. The configuration of the NDIS drivers is controlled by a file called "protocol.ini". This file is located in the directory C:/LANMAN when NDIS is installed via the nfsconf utility of PC-NFS 3.5. 38.11 State,Local Governments To Workstations MILPITAS, Calif. --February 12, 1992-- Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc., announced today that it is making major inroads into state and local governments, adding more than 40 state and local customers in just the past few months. For example, the City of Colorado Springs Utilities, one of the few municipally owned utilities to manage and provide electric, gas, water and wastewater services under one umbrella, is using Sun SPARC workstations to capture and manipulate all of its geographic data. Other recent customer wins include the Chicago Bureau of Parking, the California Department of Water Resources and the City of Albuquerque's Public Works and Planning Departments. During fiscal year 1991, Sun Federal expanded its customer base from 34 to 46 states and tripled overall sales in the state and local marketplace. 38.12 SPARCstation IPX-424 - New 424MB Configurations of the best-selling SPARCstation IPX - Immediate availability Configurations Available: 16" GX color, 16MB RAM, 424MB Disk 19" GX color, 16MB RAM, 424MB Disk 424MB disk configurations of the SPARCstation IPX are available 3 February, 1992, offering both expanded disk capacity and higher disk performance. The new IPX configurations enhance Sun's mid-range desktop workstation product line with a broader offering of storage capabilities. 38.13 SMCC and P.INK Sign Reseller Agreement Agreement Targets Commercial Electronic Publishing Market BOSTON, Mass. --Feb. 18, 1992-- Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC) and P.INK America, a Time Warner Inc., company, announced today at the Seybold Publishing Conference that they have signed an agreement under which P.INK America(TM) will bundle Sun's SPARC(R) computers in its electronic publishing solution, called P.INK Press(TM). P.INK, a leading reseller of high-end publishing solutions, has already signed $1.5 million worth of contracts for the P.INK Press system in Europe. P.INK Press will be sold in North America by P.INK America, with European sales coordinated through partner company P.INK Software Engineering and Co., GmbH of Hamburg, Germany. 38.14 Silicon Graphics To Ship SunSoft's ToolTalk Object-Oriented Software Allows Apps To Communicate Across Multiple Platforms MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 19, 1992 -- Continuing its momentum in the market, SunSoft's ToolTalk was today endorsed by Silicon Graphics. ToolTalk is object-oriented software that enables multiple applications to share data across networks regardless of hardware platform, thereby meeting one of the industry's biggest challenges in delivering distributed computing to the desktop. Silicon Graphics will ship ToolTalk on its IRIS 4D systems by the end of 1992. Since its introduction last June, SunSoft's ToolTalk has become the de-facto standard for network-based interoperability between software applications. Today, in a related announcement, several new software vendors endorsed ToolTalk, including Frame, Interleaf and Applix. These vendors add to the growing list of companies, such as Lotus Development Corp. and Cadence Design Systems, that have announced their support for ToolTalk. 38.15 Momentum Continues For SunSoft's ToolTalk MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 19,1992 -- A host of software developers today endorsed SunSoft's ToolTalk for next-generation application development. Frame, Interleaf, Applix, Island Graphics, Harris Scientific Calculations, Visix, Softool, CaseWare, QualTrak, SunPro, Digital Tools, TeamOne Systems, Procase and Silvaco International announced support for the object-oriented interapplication communications software. These software companies add to the growing list of vendors and organizations that have selected ToolTalk as the foundation to deliver distributed computing at the desktop, making it the most widely used solution for network-based interoperability between applications. In the last few months, companies supporting a range of markets endorsed ToolTalk, including Lotus Development Corp., Cadence Design Systems, Cadre Technologies, Clarity Software, Interactive Development Environments (IDE) and CenterLine Software (formerly Saber Software). In addition, the software is used by the industry-standards body, the CAD Framework Initiative (CFI). 38.16 Liken - Macintosh Emulation For SPARC machines This is an interesting third party product announcement. Liken is a product that will allow you to run Mac apps on a Sun just as DOSwindows or SoftPC allows you to run DOS apps. I think that Liken is a product of Xcelerated Systems, Inc. 3944 Murphy Canyon Road, Suite C201 San Diego, CA 92123 Voice: (619)576-3080 FAX: (619)576-2504 while Sunburst are a reseller. I Could be wrong, but there is enough interest in this product that I'll post this article while verifying the relationship between Sunburst and Xcelerated Systems. I have an evaluation copy of Liken and it's neat! -johnj Sunburst Computers, Inc. 619-633-1680 - phone 619-633-1169 - fax Liken TM Liken is a SunOS application that runs Apple Macintosh applications and Macintosh System Software such as Finder and the Desktop Accessories on a SPARC workstation. Liken provides an easy to use environment for Macintosh compatible applications. Liken provides an emulation of a Motorola 68000 processor, and allows the use of the SPARC display, keyboard, mouse, hard disk, floppy disk, and CDROM drives. Liken runs under the Open Windows SunOS windowing system and is specifically designed to operate with customer-supplied Apple Macintosh System Software v. 6.0.7. 38.17 Technical Books Review Newsletter This is an announcement from USENET. -johnj From: james@techbook.com (James Deibele) Newsgroups: comp.newprod Subject: New Newsletter on technical books Organization: TECHbooks of Beaverton Oregon - Public Access Unix Q: What is the TECHbooks Journal? A: It's published 10 times a year. The goal during a year is to cover every new technical book that's published and many valuable older books. We also publish category collections listing every book available on a certain subject, like Emacs, neural nets, and fractals. 38.18 NetNews/CD - USENET News Available on CD-ROM Sterling Software is proud to announce a new service, NetNews/CD, which makes USENET News available on CD-ROM. Now, with NetNews/CD, the wealth of information available via USENET is archived and readily available when you need it, not just when it arrives. With NetNews/CD you will be able to keep years of USENET News on your shelf so that you can access and benefit from it at your convenience. With nearly 3000 active newsgroups and more being created daily, one of the major problems with USENET News has been the massive amounts of data. Most sites do not have the disk space to store it all on a daily basis, let alone a yearly basis. Those that do receive a full feed are forced to use relatively short news expire times to free up disk space for incoming daily news. Many sites have had to limit the number of groups they subscribe to due to the speeds of their modems, the costs of long distance phone calls to an upstream USENET feed or the size of the available disk space. NetNews/CD solves these problems by making nearly 600 Megabytes of USENET news available on CD-ROM each issue. The issues are currently being filled up on a 22 day average. 38.19 USENIX 1992 Winter Conference Proceedings Now Available This is an article from comp.org.usenix. -johnj From: toni@usenix.ORG (Toni Veglia) Newsgroups: comp.org.usenix,comp.org.sug Organization: USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA If you couldn't join us in San Francisco, CA, the proceedings from the USENIX 1992 Winter Conference are now available. The price is $30 for members, and $39 for non-members and includes domestic and Canadian postage. Please add $22 for overseas postage (air printed matter). You can place your order by phone or email by using your VISA or Mastercard, or you can send a check or company purchase order to our office. USENIX Association 2560 Ninth Street, Suite 215 Berkeley, CA 94710 (510)528-8649 fax (510)548-5738 office@usenix.org 38.20 Sun Microsystems: One Smart 10-Year-Old Startup Revolutionizes Computer Industry MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. February 24, 1992 Ten years ago this month, several entrepreneurs in their mid-20s signed the papers incorporating Sun Microsystems. They built their first computers mostly by hand in what the local press dubbed "an oversized garage" in Santa Clara, Calif. And in their first year of business, they saw $8 million in sales. Yet, Sun's young founders weren't driven by money. They were driven by a vision of a computing world that didn't exist a world based on "open" computer systems: "We always said, `Let's think big.' If we fail, we'll make the biggest crash anyone has ever seen. But if we succeed, we'll change the fundamentals of the computer business the same way Henry Ford changed the fundamentals of the automobile business." CEO Scott McNealy, Fortune , August 17, 1987 38.21 Sun MP Server Delivers Best TPC-A Price Performance in Industry Sun Multiprocessor Server Running Sybase RDBMS Delivers Industry's Best Price/Performance On TPC-A Benchmark Test Also Shows That Sun/Sybase Solution Can Support Many Terminals While Maintaining High Throughput MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --February 24, 1992-- The industry's best price/performance on the highly regarded TPC-A benchmark was achieved by the SPARCserver(TM) 690MP system and SYBASE(R) SQL Server(TM) 4.8 relational database management system (RDBMS), today reported Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. (SMCC) and Sybase, Inc. SMCC's high-end multiprocessor server running the SYBASE RDBMS performed at 95.41 transactions per second (tps), with a cost/tps of just $8,836. This beats all TPC-A price/performance results for all systems, including all comparable UNIX(R) systems. TPC-A -- utilized as a measurement by leading vendors for systems ranging up to superminicomputers -- is the most precise, objective and well-accepted test for throughput and database performance. The test reflects a typical on-line transaction processing (OLTP) application, one of the most mission-critical areas within commercial markets today. The SPARCserver's TPC-A results indicate the system's suitability for OLTP functions within markets such as financial services, hotel and airline reservations, healthcare and insurance. In addition, technical areas such as manufacturing that need OLTP can also take advantage of the Sun server. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ For information send mail to info-sunflash@sunvice.East.Sun.COM. Subscription requests should be sent to sunflash-request@sunvice.East.Sun.COM. Archives are on solar.nova.edu, paris.cs.miami.edu, uunet.uu.net, src.doc.ic.ac.uk and ftp.adelaide.edu.au All prices, availability, and other statements relating to Sun or third party products are valid in the U.S. only. Please contact your local Sales Representative for details of pricing and product availability in your region. Descriptions of, or references to products or publications within SunFlash does not imply an endorsement of that product or publication by Sun Microsystems. John McLaughlin, SunFlash editor, flash@sunvice.East.Sun.COM. (305) 776-7770.