From: evbrown@digi.lonestar.org (Evan Brown)
Newsgroups: dfw.general,tx.general
Subject: Dallas/Ft.Worth UNIX Users Group October newsletter
Date: 30 Sep 92 01:11:24 GMT
Distribution: tx
Organization: Dallas/Ft.Worth UNIX Users Group


                 Dallas Ft.Worth Unix Users Group
         Promoting the Education and Understanding of Unix
                    Unix is a trademark of AT&T

No. 77 Edited and Published by Evan Brown and John Fusselman  October, 1992
__________________________________________________________________
                      GENERAL  MEETING  INFO

Meetings are held the first THURSDAY of every month (unless it  is
a  holiday)  at  the Hewlett-Packard facility in Las Colinas (3301
Royal Lane, Irving, TX  75063 - 214-830-8994).

Meeting schedule:
  6:00-7:00 Board Meeting (all members welcome)
  7:00-7:20 Socializing
  7:20-7:40 Introduce Visitors and Club Business
  7:40-8:30 General Interest Presentation
  8:30-8:40 Break
  8:40-9:30 SIG
__________________________________________________________________

                             OFFICERS

Kevin Coyle                 President                     519-3452
Thurman Harden                V Pres                  817/478-5070
Robert Bair                 Secretary                     243-2015
Evan Brown               Treas+Membership                 618-3525
John Fusselman                Editor                      458-5480
Grady Walker               Hospitality                    231-6101

__________________________________________________________________

                            THIS MONTH

Thursday October 1                           7PM - HP, Las Colinas

                         Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett Packard will give a presentation on network  node  manage-
ment and software tools to help manage the network.

                     Special Interest Groups

               Don Mathis will continue discussing
                     UNIX topics of interest.

__________________________________________________________________

                       Other UNIX Meetings:

The CACTUS (Austin UNIX Users Group) meets the third  Thursday  of
  each month at the Dell computer building.

The HOUNIX (Houston UNIX Users Group) meets the third  Tuesday  of
  each month.

The HUGS (Houston SunMicrosystems UNIX Users Group) meets  at  the
  Houston Sun Office at 12 Greenway Plaza on the 15th floor.

The San Antonio UNIX Users Group meets the third Wednesday of each
  month at the Sun Microsystems office.

For more information contact Evan Brown.
__________________________________________________________________

                            LAST MONTH

Tom OKeefe won the door prize, a copy of Advanced  Programming  in
the  Unix  Environment  by  W. Richard Stevens; remarkably Tom was
planning to order a copy of the book with the next club book  ord-
er.

Main Presentation

              Tadpole: Nomadic Computing Environment

Jim Thompson and Mike Hayes from  the  Austin  office  of  Tadpole
Technology Inc. were the guest speakers for the September meeting.
They presented Tadpole's  "nomadic  computing  environment"  which
Tadpole is defining as being distinctly different from mobile com-
puting. A mobile computer is one that is  carried  from  place  to
place  and  is  used  to dial back into the main network, at which
time real work can be done; a nomadic computer functions at a high
level all of the time and is occasionally connected to the network
back home, at which time communications which  have  been  delayed
are transmitted.

From the nomadic user's point of view, their  full  function  Unix
computer  appears  to them always to function the same, whether or
not it is connected to the network; if one has  ever  accidentally
kicked  their  ethernet  cable  loose,  this is unusual to say the
least. Also, a person on the go will not have a system administra-
tor  at  hand  to  smooth  the operation of their computer. On the
road, mail is read and answered and the  high  level  applications
normally available are still available; later when the computer is
connected to the home network, mail is automatically exchanged and
the computer automatically adapts to being on the network.

That is nomadic computing in a nutshell. A complete  writeup  fol-
lows on page 2.
__________________________________________________________________

                       GENERAL INFORMATION

                        Upcoming Meetings
Nov 5

   Alfie Kilgus with Apple Computer will give  a  presentation  on
   AUX (Apple UniX).
__________________________________________________________________

                             Tadpole:
                  Nomadic Computing Environment

                   Mike Hayes and Jim Thompson
                          as reported by
                          John Fusselman

Mike Hayes, from Tadpole's sales organization, began the presenta-
tion  by  telling  us  of the history of Tadpole.  Tadpole is an 8
year old company that started by designing and building board lev-
el  VMEBUS  products  which were incorporated into many other com-
panies' products, Amdahl, for instance. Competition became  fierce
in this market as others, including Motorola, entered it. So, Tad-
pole looked around and settled on Sun's  SPARC  chipset  as  their
vehicle into the future but not just to build another workstation.
Nothing less than a notebook RISC would suffice!

The questions immediately began to arise, all essentially deriving
from  the  main question: How to make Solaris portable? Thus began
the definition of the nomadic computing environment  and  features
to make it feasible.  Under portable system enhancements, there is
the save and resume feature: whereas from powerup to  application,
a  workstation will require 4 to 6 minutes, a Tadpole user will be
in their application in 30 to 45 seconds! There  is  an  automatic
low  battery  save  to avoid the power hit from depleting the bat-
teries; communications links were incorporated between Solaris and
the  hardware  to  allow automatic graceful shutdown to avoid cor-
rupting files. To conserve precious  battery  power,  there  is  a
power  management system to slow the CPU operation for noncompute-
intensive operations - 1/2 the speed only consumes 1/2 the  power.
The  power  management  system also controls power to the internal
disks and the screen; resources not in use are  powered  off.  Not
only the screen but unused disk drives may be turned off.

The operating system itself was targeted for reduction,  resulting
in  a  "lite"  OS.  The  file system and utilities were optimized,
dropping what was not essential; the kernel is now only 800 kbytes
and  more work is underway to reduce it further.  The result is an
OS, including the windowing system - minus lots  of  fonts,  which
needs  just  55 or 60 megabytes leaving 80 or 90 megabytes for the
user files and applications. The 180 megabyte 2  1/2"  drive  just
now  beginning  to  ship  will  also be of help. Additionally, the
portable windows driver had to be highly modified.

Last and certainly not least, attention was paid to  the  portable
networking  environment or what happens when no client/server net-
work is available? The last thing a nomadic computer user needs is
a  message  like  the  following,  30,000  feet over the Atlantic,
``Server not responding for domain "tadpole", still trying.''

At this point Mike briefly recapitulated the evolution of  comput-
ers,  explaining that in the beginning there were mainframes which
were replaced in part by  departmental  computers,  minicomputers.
Suddenly,  an  individual  department could have its own computing
resources! Mini's in turn were swept  aside  by  PC's  which  were
closely followed by the development of the client/server computing
relationship, which allowed individual users  to  have  their  own
computers  but  share  data and applications with others. Most re-
cently mobile computers have arrived and now  Tadpole  strives  to
define  "nomadic computing." With mobile computers, the user still
must connect to the network, perhaps from a  different  city  each
day  but  still  access to the home network is imperative. By com-
parison nomadic computing allows the user to take  their  environ-
ment  with  them,  wherever  they go, including 30,000 feet in the
air.

There must be some allowances in the system  for  the  differences
imposed  by  a nomadic existence, whether or not they are apparent
to the user. X11/News must take into account the small screen  and
the  lack of a builtin mouse. NIS must accept the current environ-
ment, flexibly accommodating the availability or not of the domain
server;  similarly,  NFS must be different. The presence or not of
an ethernet connection must be handled transparently; no "le0:  no
carrier"  messages.  Electronic  mail must allow for extended dead
periods; normally, mail expires or is bounced  after  three  days.
The  builtin  power  management  features  mentioned in a previous
paragraph are representative of the hardware modifications.

To help the listener appreciate their concept Tadpole provides the
definitions  of  mobile,  which  includes  the  key  words "can be
moved," and nomadic, "an environment allowing a computer  user  to
work  in her normal way while disconnected." The director of sales
of Tadpole has used his computer on board a trans-Atlantic flight;
his  nickname  is  "Tad  the  nomad"  due to his extensive travels
[perhaps he is trying to emulate the success of Scott  McNealy  of
Sun  Microsystems, a man of whom some of Apollo's last words were,
"it's hard to beat Scott McNealy on an airplane 23 hours a day." -
Ed.]

Jim Thompson, Portability Scientist from Tadpole, expanded on  the
nomadic  computing  environment by telling us that it is Tadpole's
expectation that now and in the future people will travel more for
both  business  and  pleasure.  Companies will work together more,
forming partnerships to capture a market. Employees will  have  to
work  more  from home in the future as governments mandate limited
parking sites to wean people from their cars; Jim stated that  ef-
fective  today  in  Silicon Valley a company may only provide only
two-thirds as many parking spaces as they have employees,  shrink-
ing  to  a .45 ratio in 1995. An information economy will have in-
formation workers, who will be asked to be more productive. Super-
markets have scanners, ATM's are proliferating, and "Just in time"
deliveries are becoming common. For another example, Jim  told  us
of  the  on  the spot simulations conducted by a major airline re-
garding baggage handling; in lieu of gathering  data  to  be  pro-
cessed  at  the home office, repeated simulations could be used to
test new hypotheses on the spot.

Jim then elaborated upon the differences between mobile and nomad-
ic  computing environments. A mobile user will maintain and browse
local databases and will be able to easily connect to  home  base.
Typical  portable applications will be a simple word processor and
a Rolodex like address data base. In contrast a nomadic user  will
be  able  to generate and manipulate locally stored information as
well as browse and retrieve information from  remote  stores.  The
nomadic user will be able to communicate with other people who use
different computers. In the field the nomadic user will be able to
interact  with a "digital assistant," for instance, to write email
which will be automatically delivered when he is next connected to
home base. In short, the primary nomadic goal is "complete comput-
ing and communications services independent of  the  user's  loca-
tion."

To allow this expansion of services required  the  development  of
new  tools. To the SLIPtool, FAXtool, and DHCP of mobile technolo-
gy, Tadpole added POPtool (Post Office Protocol  tool)  to  handle
email and calendaring, a tool which keeps synchronized locally and
remotely maintained schedules, so that the traveler and their home
office  assistant  can  each  independently  modify the traveler's
schedule. The pull down menu of  TZtool  allows  local  time  zone
selection.  Also,  there is a transaction based filesystem manager
and IPIP to aid networking transparency.

The small size of the Tadpole units requires smart data  handling;
compression  technology  gets  the  most  out of thinner wires and
smaller disks. Extensive  multimedia  capabilities  helps  deliver
more information to the user; in addition to calendaring and email
there is also text to speech capability. Jim concluded his portion
of  the  presentation  by stating, "portability is an environment,
not an implementation."

Tadpole's SPARCbook is available with a color screen  featuring  a
thin film transistor (TFT) liquid crystal display. The unit weighs
less than 7 pounds, has a 25MHZ SPARC chip set with 16  or  32  MB
RAM,  built  in 2400 baud modem, SIO port, parallel port featuring
100 KB/sec transfer rates, and up to two 180 MB disk  drives.  The
keyboard  has full sized keys, 82 in all including integral Mouse-
Key and 12 function keys; external mouse and keyboard  support  is
included.  Battery life for the color unit is 2 to 2 1/2, maybe 3,
hours and 3 to 3 1/2 hours for the black and white unit. The  next
nearest  competitive  units,  by Sony and REI, are hardly notebook
sized as they weigh in at 14 pounds. Basically, the SPARCbook is a
SPARC  chipset  surrounded  by  laptop  PC  chips,  the only chips
currently in large scale production that perform the tasks  needed
to make the SPARCbook possible.

Given their goal of enabling the user to process  potentially  in-
valuable  data  remotely in such a portable unit, security is cer-
tainly a concern. Not to worry;  an  EEPROM  stores  an  encrypted
password,  preventing the machine from booting if stolen. Not only
that, the disk drives are serially numbered and their numbers  are
stored  in the machine; if they are replaced, the machine will not
boot.
__________________________________________________________________

                             SPONSORS

We want to recognize the following companies for their support.

 Grady Walker                    (214)231-6101
 Leader in UNIX technology
 Hewlett Packard
 3301 Royal Lane
 Irving, TX 75063

 Paul S. Levine                   (214)714-0324
 High Performance NFS file servers
 Auspex Systems, Inc.
 1231 Greenway Drive, Suite 230
 Irving, TX 75038

 David Hayes              metro(817)929-9179
 Vendor-Independent Network Consulting
 N-Team, Inc.
 PO Box 201894
 Arlington, TX 76006

 Lou Marchant             metro(817)589-0949
 Tools for building Quality Software
 Programming Research Corporation
 8701 Bedford Euless Road, Suite 520
 Hurst, TX 76053

 Alma Weaver                    (214) 669-3800
 Placing Contract Technical Personnel
 Oxford & Associates, Inc.
 11910 Greenville Ave, Suite 512 LB#24
 Dallas, TX 75243

 Richard Blickenstaff           (800) 932-2372
 Provides computer consulting resources
 Enterprise Systems Associates, Inc.
 7041 Koll Center Parkway, Suite 260
 Pleasanton, CA 94566

 Ken Hatten                    (214) 453-7264
 GTE Directories Corp.
 P.O. Box 619810, Cube A1-334
 D/FW Airport, Texas  75261-9810

 Honore LaBourdette            (214)746-4343
 Telebit Corporation
 1950 Stemmons Freeway, Suite 5037F
 Dallas, TX 75207

 Rob Kolstad                   (800) 800-4BSD
 Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
 3110 Fairview Park Drive, Suite 580
 Falls Church, VA 22042

 E-mail: bsdi-info@bsdi.com


 Becky Swanson                 (214) 660-4202
 Benchmark Publications Group,Inc.
 P.O. Box 180222
 Arlington, TX 76096-0222

 Robert Bair                     (800) 288-1110
 Resource Solutions International
 3030 LBJ FRWY. Suite 300
 Dallas, TX. 75234

 E-mail: 451-5669@MCIMAIL
 Excellence in UNIX Technology Consulting


 Don Mathis                      (214) 238-8744
 Lone Star Industrial Company
 12311 Cross Creek
 Dallas, TX 75243

 Rob Whitener                  (214) 919-9358
 INTERPHASE Corporation
 13800 Senlac
 Dallas, TX 75234
__________________________________________________________________

                       The UNIX Job Market

JCS Consulting is looking for individuals with Small Talk  experi-
ence.  Contact Nancy Deanaur at 458-1609 for details.

Resource Solutions International is looking for  individuals  with
UNIX  internals and C programmers.  Special skill desired are dev-
ice drivers, testing, OSF development, TCP/IP internals,  and  AIX
or  UNIX based systems experience.  For additional details contact
Robert Bair at 214-243-2015.

Lear Data is looking for individuals  with  1-5  years  experience
with  C/UNIX  for local contracts.  For additional details contact
Cynthia Kamel at 214-360-9008.

Computer Professionals Unlimited is looking for experienced UNIX &
C programmers.  For details call Zip Zapotocky at 214/233-1773.

Evan Brown will bring a  printout  from  the  network  News  group
<misc.jobs.offered>  to  the  meeting.   Please  do not remove the
printout, Evan only brings one copy to the meetings.
__________________________________________________________________

                             C TAPES

To obtain the use of one of the  three  sets  of  the  C  training
tapes,  simply call Grady Walker and either Grady or his coordina-
tor will assist you. If this is the first you have heard of  these
tapes,  they are excellent for anyone needing an introduction to C
programming or simply to brush up on the finer  points  of  C  and
their  use  is free to members. The tapes were professionally pro-
duced by AT&T and are well worth the time it takes  to  view  them
for anyone other than the most skilled C programmers.
__________________________________________________________________

                          ADVERTISEMENTS

NOTE:  Ads will be printed on a space-available basis as a service
to members of the DFWUUG [Ed.]
                              - o -
Networks that net, workstations that work.  We connect anything to
 anything  (almost). If your network is getting the better of you,
 get help from the best.
                  N-Team. Inc. metro 817-929-9179
                              - o -
Mac to Unix Connectivity: Apple consultant with extensive Unix ad-
 ministration  and network experience will help your Macs and Unix
 systems communicate and share printers and data. Call Tom Karches
 at (214)942-9459
                              - o -
Classes in Richardson:
   X / Motif____________Nov 9-13; Dec 7-11; Jan  4 -  8
   C Programming____________________________Oct  5 -  9
   C++ & OOP________________________________Nov 16 - 20
   UNIX Concepts & Commands ________________Oct 27 - 30
   User Intro to UNIX_______________________Dec  7 -  8
   MS Windows_______________________________Nov 19 - 23
   Advanced C & Data Structures_____________Oct 12 - 16
   C for Non Programmers____________________Nov  2 -  6
Texas Software Services / Clarity Learning
Chuck Lundin      214 - 272-6982
                              - o -
Software Engineering provides expertise  in  object-oriented  pro-
 gramming,  specializing  in  the application of O-O techniques to
 real-time programming problems using  C++  and  UNIX  or  MS-DOS.
 Call Jack Carden at (214) 418-6283.
                              - o -
Benchmark Publications Group, Inc. offers a full array of document
 preparation  services, as well as publishing consulting.  For ad-
 ditional information and  literature  contact  Becky  Swanson  at
 (214) 660-4202.
                              - o -
For employment and consulting opportunities contact Howard  Oplin,
 Stephens  Recruiting  Group,  Computer  Division.  Phone 214-233-
 8575.  Howard has 32 years of experience in software  development
 and 11 years in UNIX.  Windows, C++, with UNIX+DOS especially HOT
 now.
__________________________________________________________________







































-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Evan Brown                 UUCP:          uunet!digi!evbrown  
DSC Communications Corp.   OR  Internet:  evbrown@digi.lonestar.org
1000 Coit Rd.,M/S 140      OR  at home:   evan@dfwuug.lonestar.org
Newsgroups: dfw.general