Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!NRTC-GREMLIN.ARPA!mrose 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 Date-Received: Sat, 20-Dec-86 23:46:03 EST References: <8612201625.AA07829@bu-cs.bu.edu> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 35 Approved: tcp-ip@sri-nic.arpa 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