[520] in Zephyr_Comments
Re: Zephyr & Macs?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (lwvanels@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Sun Dec 15 15:28:19 1991
From: lwvanels@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 91 15:26:13 -0500
To: ggs@leland.stanford.edu
Cc: jtkohl@Athena.MIT.EDU, zephyr-comments@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: [519]
Reply-To: lwvanels@mit.edu
Hello-
> I'm investingating implementation options for an on-line
>consulting system at Stanford University. According to one of the
>professors I've spoken with, Project Athena developed a consulting
>system for the Mac using Zephyr as the transport-level protocol.
>I would like to know if the Mac front end is also publicly
>avilable, or if you would at least be willing to describe its
>general features.
Unfortunately, we havn't developed a system exactly like the one you
described. There is the on-line consulting system (OLC) for Unix platforms,
which does use zephyr to notify the consultants of events (though the actual
communication between the OLC clients and server is a different,
socket-based protocol). This has been ported to the Macintoshes running
Apple's version of Unix, AUX.
There is currently work going on to develop an OLC client under MacOs, but
it is not to a point where it is usable yet. As a separate project, Zephyr
has been ported under MacOS, and there are people actively using it.
However, I do not know if that has been set up for use outside of MIT yet;
I've forwarded along your message to the person in charge of that, who
hopefully can supply more details about it.
> Also, who do I talk to about Zephyr? It seems that the
>zephyr archives on athena-dist.mit.edu are a bit old. I imagine
>some new work has been done since. Is it available anywhere?
>Thanks for your time.
Yes, you're right the archives are old; they havn't been updated in quite a
while. However, the changes since then have been mostly minor bugfixes and
ports to other versions of Unix; no major functionality has been added since
those were packaged up. Currently, work is going on to improve the
performance of the Zephyr server; once that is done, hopefully there will be
time available for the recent work to be packaged up for distribution.
The "zephyr-comments@athena" list is read by most of the people who have
worked/are working on Zephyr at MIT; there is also the list "zephyr@athena"
which also goes to people outside of MIT interested in Zephyr.
-Lucien
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lucien Van Elsen | lwvanels@athena.mit.edu
MIT I.S. Distributed Systems |
