Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: NFS for the Mac Keywords: NFS Macintosh Kinetics Localtalk Ethernet Message-ID: <5459@hoptoad.uucp> Date: 26 Sep 88 02:46:30 GMT References: <669@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu> Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco Lines: 27 TOPS is supposedly converting over to NFS, but don't hold your breath. TOPS is owned by Sun, and there's too much religious fervor in Sun about NFS to make the changes needed for microcomputers. I wish I could tell some of the stories about negotiations on NFS changes, but I don't want to appear mean-spirited toward my former employer. I will say that being ordered to drop what I was doing and port RPC (a profoundly bad protocol, the underlying layer of NFS) to the Mac had a great deal to do with my decision to leave TOPS this summer. Let's not discuss the merits of RPC; I have grown tired of bullyragging dogmatists who won't see that 50-75K for a transport protocol is too much for microcomputers, or that a standard protocol needs complete documentation outside the source code, or that atrillion dispatched (not library) function calls annihilate performance. Let's just say the suitability of NFS/RPC for non-UNIX operating systems was proclaimed by Sun engineers before they had actually made it work on any other systems, and that they still stick to it even though every attempt to port NFS to anything but MS-DOS has given very disappointing results. TOPS developed the TOPS protocol on two systems at once, and successfully ported it to two other systems, and they are being foolish to discard that advantage over NFS. Enough said. -- Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim "Strong men tremble when they hear it. They've got cause enough to fear it; It's even blacker than they smear it! No one mentions -- my name." - Bill Sykes, "Oliver"