Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ephraim
From: ephraim@think.COM (ephraim vishniac)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Anybody using MacWorkStation?
Message-ID: <21441@think.UUCP>
Date: 31 May 88 20:05:26 GMT
Sender: usenet@think.UUCP
Reply-To: ephraim@think.com (ephraim vishniac)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 34


The description in the May 1988 _Outside_Apple_ makes MacWorkStation
sound like an almost ideal vehicle for whipping up a Mac front end to
a mainframe application.  The price is a bit steep, but not a problem
if MWS is really good (i.e., is usable and will save us several months
of work).  So my question is, how good is MWS?  I'd like to hear the
good and the bad from anybody who's worked with it.

I'm especially interested in how well it can handle a situation such
as the following:

We're building an information retrieval system.  The result of a
search is a list of articles, with their headlines visible.  The user
should be able to browse through the articles in any way he pleases.
To improve apparent performance, we should anticipate his likely
choices by sending the first few paragraphs and the best few
paragraphs of each article while the user is pondering his next move.
Paragraphs will be cached in memory.  If the user selects something
we've prefetched, we win.  If he makes an unanticipated move, we
should be able to abort our transfer and act on his request promptly.

Will MWS allow us to carry on this kind of background activity?  Does
it use error-detecting/correcting protocols?  Does it allow
transmission of binary data or are you restricted by the underlying
network?  What's the performance like on bulk data transfer?

Also, short of buying the whole package, is any technical
documentation available that might answer questions such as the above?

Ephraim Vishniac					  ephraim@think.com
Thinking Machines Corporation / 245 First Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1214

     On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put
     into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"