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From: bc@halley.UUCP (Bill Crews)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
Subject: Re: standard interface
Message-ID: <307@halley.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 30-Nov-87 08:14:08 EST
Article-I.D.: halley.307
Posted: Mon Nov 30 08:14:08 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Dec-87 04:29:46 EST
References: <301@halley.UUCP> <8711140117.AA08165@violet.berkeley.edu> <304@halley.UUCP> <1563@faline.bellcore.com>
Reply-To: bc@halley.UUCP (Bill Crews)
Organization: Tandem Computers, Austin, TX
Lines: 38

In article <1563@faline.bellcore.com> karn@faline.bellcore.com (Phil R. Karn) writes:
>I've been following the discussion about standard programming interfaces
>to transport protocols on the PC, but I'm puzzled.
>
>The ability to support multiple concurrent applications was an absolute
>design criteria in the KA9Q Internet Protocol package. Since MS-DOS by
>itself is little more than a glorified bootstrap loader, I had little
>choice but to combine all of the protocols and applications into a
>single MS-DOS program (net.exe) which essentially takes over the machine
>and performs a crude form of multitasking internally. (You *can* run
>other things alongside net.exe by using DoubleDos or Desqview, but
>there's no inter-process communication).

Now *I*'m puzzled.  If (a) DOS is normally used in a single-tasking mode and
(b) with DoubleDOS or DesqView, you don't get interprocess communication, then
how do you figure that a self-contained net.exe supports "multiple concurrent
applications"?  Are all the applications built into the net.exe (yuck!)?  The
normal DOS-ish way of doing this is to provide an interface across a software
interrupt -- i.e., TSR.  But somehow this is what you are arguing *against*?

>I see little hope of establishing a standard application/transport
>interface on the PC until we can trash MS-DOS in favor of a "grownup"
>operating system. I'm not willing to sacrifice concurrent applications.

What do programming interfaces and application portability across them
have to do with the fact that DOS is single-tasking?  This seem to me to be
independent.

>I'd like to come to the TCP/IP Interoperability conference, but I already
>agreed to go to another conference to talk about...yes, TCP/IP. :-)

Darn, Karn, I was hoping to see you there, and to talk with you about KA9Q.

-bc
-- 
Bill Crews                                   Tandem Computers
                                             Austin, Texas
..!rutgers!im4u!esc-bb!halley!bc             (512) 244-8350