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"