From: jabusch@zorro.cecer.army.mil (John Jabusch)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.banyan-l
Subject: Re: PC-TCP for Windows
Date: 15 Dec 92 22:11:11 GMT
Organization: US Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Labs

"James B. Van Bokkelen - V.P. Technical Services" <jbvb@FTP.COM> writes:

>Someone forwarded the recent discussion to me, and I'd like to clarify
>some points.

>1. IBANYAN is the kernel Banyan sells.  It uses VINES to encapsulate the
>IP datagrams, so the VINES server has to re-encapsulate them and forward
>them of the VINES subnet.  The PC can use any media VINES supports.

>2. EBANYAN is a kernel we sell (part PC-215), which sends direct to the
>Ethernet (not 802.5 or other media), using VINES' hardware driver.

Banyan Systems, Inc. also sells this one.

>3. There is a BANPKT under development by a member of the Packet Driver
>community, that uses the same hardware driver interface as EBANYAN.  I
>saw a notice saying it was in beta test a week or two ago, but I don't
>remember where it was available.

I remember where it was available, and it's a pretty rough beta right
now, not worth experimenting with for another revision or so.

>4. Our ETHDRV kernel (Packet Driver - part PC-210) and DIS_PKT NDIS
>adapter will share an NDIS driver with VINES, but EBANYAN couldn't
>run with at least one version of the VINES for NDIS.  IBANYAN didn't
>have this problem.

This is understandable.  With the NDIS driver replacing Banyan's standard
and proprietary driver at the board level, only IBANYAN should work.
This tells me that FTP's EBANYAN driver uses a very low level section
of the VINES Ethernet drivers, that just doesn't even exist in the
VINES NDISBAN driver.

>5. We use LIM EMS because it can be used on 8086s, too, and when we
>committed to it DPMI was not as stable as it is now.  We're aware of
>the issue.

Yuck.  Understandable marketing issue at the time, but definitely 
behind.  Of course, we're talking about DOS platforms (sigh.).

>6. The reason Tech Support works the way it does is because when a vendor
>wants to pay us a lower price we say: "but we can't afford to support it
>at that price" and the vendor says: "that's fine, we'll support it".  We
>like our customers to be happy whether they bought direct or not, but we
>don't want to go broke either.  FTP's President agrees with me on this.

It's amazing that most of the commercial PC-based neato IP software (X
servers, etc.) rely on PC/TCP as a primary protocol stack, and yet
FTP isn't making enough money to drive its software costs lower.
I refer to an earlier posting I made on the price ratio between PC/TCP
and WordPerfect.  If complexity of the software is an argument, then
why can Microsoft sell Windows for $99?  IBM OS/2 is $99.  I can name
countless other examples of software that is EXTREMELY complex, difficult
to support, produced by large or small companies, and sold at far lower
cost than PC/TCP.  The really amazing thing here is your implication 
that at reduced prices, you can't support the product.  I must be dense
because I sure don't understand why PC/TCP still costs over $300 in small
quantities, and $140 in large quantities.  (Assuming that incredible
profit margins isn't the primary reason ;-)

>7. If you have a serialized version of PC/TCP, and use the same serial
>number on two different PCs, the users will get plaintive messages
>about the conflict every few minutes.  The serial numbers are set in
>the 'config file' (usually PCTCP.INI, pointed to by the PCTCP
>environment variable).  This is also where the IP addresses and user
>ids are, so the file already has to exist on a per-PC basis.

This is one of the more reasonable approaches to piracy - let 'em work,
but make 'em pay for it!  That way, it's easy to bring up additional,
unplanned for workstations and then order the software licenses as fast
as you can.  Not all software is quite so forgiving at this stage.
See, I don't have all bad things to say about FTP!  ;-)

-- 
John W. Jabusch
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