cdecl availability

[Ben Cranston]

In article <2218 at umcp-cs.UUCP> chris at maryland.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:

> ....  BITNET people should consider using
> umd2.umd.edu as a gateway, as it is practically on the same Ethercable
> as mimsy.umd.edu.

Well, Chris, this is close (and we hope will be closer in the near feature).
As I understand it UMD1 is on the Ethercable.  UMD1 has a 40KB sync link to
UMD2, which then has a 64KB HASP link to UMDD.  So far, not too terribly bad.
But the kicker is that UMDD's link to the rest of BitNet is all of 9600 baud
and is going to be the bottleneck.   

We have the hardware for UMD2 to talk directly to the Ethercable and have
bounced commands off it, so all we really need to do is cobble together a
device driver and low level communications handler for it.

If there is a huge demand for cdecl on BitNet maybe we can get one of the
BitNic servers to carry it.  Then BitNet people would say (something like):

     tell bitnic sendme cdecl

and a card deck would automagically appear in their (virtual) card reader.

Chris, I hope there aren't any lines in CDECL longer than 80 characters...

-- 
                    umd5.UUCP    <= {seismo!umcp-cs,ihnp4!rlgvax}!cvl!umd5!zben
Ben Cranston zben @ umd2.UMD.EDU    Kingdom of Merryland Sperrows 1100/92
                    umd2.BITNET     "via HASP with RSCS"