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From: mrose@NRTC-GREMLIN.ARPA.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: NFS comments
Message-ID: <1472.535498616@nrtc-gremlin.arpa>
Date: Sat, 20-Dec-86 21:35:11 EST
Article-I.D.: nrtc-gre.1472.535498616
Posted: Sat Dec 20 21:35:11 1986
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    An excellent question.  As with most "international standards" you
    have to qualify which point in the life of you're talking about:  

	WD - working draft
	DP - draft proposal
	DIS - draft international standard
	IS - international standard

    There are, to my knowledge, no implementations of the FTAM DIS, as
    it was only recently released (August, 1986).  I expect this to
    change in about six months.

    There are however some implementations of the FTAM DP, I believe
    that DEC has one, that Concord Data Systems has one, and probably
    about five other MAP/TOP vendors (a few even claim to have it
    running on the PC).  I'll ask my local MAP/TOP guru here which
    implementations are available and I'll get back to you.  

    Organizations like the NBS and COS (Corporation or Open Systems) in
    the US and SPAG and ECMA in Europe have done a fine job of
    specifying the "agreed subset" of FTAM which should be implemented.
    This makes the harmonization problem (getting different vendors
    implementations to work together) much easier.  However, the FTAM
    DIS and the FTAM DP are NOT, repeat NOT, compatible (they even use
    different underlying services), so it's not clear how much of a DP
    implementation can be used when building a DIS implementation.

    To comment a bit on some related mail: if I remember the FTAM spec
    correctly, you can do things like forced-append writes and
    record-level access.  I don't think you'll see the first generation
    of FTAM DIS implementations do this, but these features are built
    into the FTAM.

/mtr