Personal IRIS Neophyte asks dumb questions...

[Mike Goss]

> Date: 10 Apr 90 15:37:31 GMT
> From: tim anderson <sumax!polari!tima at beaver.cs.washington.edu>
> Organization: PolarServ, Seattle WA
> Subject: Personal IRIS Neophyte asks dumb questions...
> Message-Id: <1520 at polari.UUCP>
> Sender: info-iris-request at BRL.MIL
> To: info-iris at BRL.MIL
> Status: RO

  ...

> First, I really really want to network my PC to this thing. What do
> I have to do to get this working? I know step one is to get a WD8003
> ethernet card, but beyond that I am a bit lost...

For cheap ethernet support, you can get NCSA Telnet for your PC.  This
software supplies Telnet and FTP commands, and comes with source if you
want to roll your own application.  It supports several different PC
Ethernet adapters.  I've used it some, and it seems to work quite well.
The only thing really lacking is file sharing, ala NFS (but for free
software, it's still pretty impressive). You can get this software via
anonymous FTP from "zaphod.ncsa.uiuc.edu", or via US Mail on diskette
if you don't have FTP (send me e-mail if you need US Mail address; I
don't have it handy at the moment).

...

> Third, I want a NON BRAIN DEAD EDITOR, I use BRIEF religiously on my PC
> and will SORELY miss using it. I really do not want to get very good at
> 'vi'...
> 

Editors are somewhat of a religion; personally I'm an Emacs believer.
Since I switch around alot between machines, I've adopted Micro-Emacs
as my standard editor.  It's not as powerful as GNU, but it runs on
just about every machine in existence (PC, Mac, BSD Unix, System V, Amiga,
Atari, etc.).  You can get source for the cost of a phone call from the
author's BBS (or for a nominal fee from some of the public domain
software places).  The author and BBS are:

	Daniel M. Lawrence
	The Programmer's Room
	FIDO 201/2
	(317) 742-5533
	24 hours  300/1200 baud

If you want the full-up GNU Emacs (for the Iris; it won't fit on a PC),
I think it's available via anonymous FTP at "prep.ai.mit.edu", along
with other GNU stuff.  It's pretty huge, so you might be better off
finding someone who's already got it on tape.
------------------------------
Mike Goss
Merit Technology Inc.
(214)733-7018
goss at snow-white.merit-tech.com