In the four or five months since the DDJ listing service opened its on-line doors, about 1500 of you have been using the service regularly, so report sysops Bill Garrison and David Betz. This translates into an average of about 2000 minutes of on-line time per day just for downloading listings from DDJ and MIPS magazine (a sister publication) and sending electronic mail to those of us at the magazine.
We'll gradually begin providing more features, starting with a list of upcoming or proposed articles. You can help us by taking a look at the selections and letting us know which ones you'd most like to see. At the same time, you can also tell us what you think about some of the articles we've recently published: Which were you favorites, which ones you didn't like, what we could have done differently.
We'd also like you to log on to give Bill and David some feedback on what you think of the service itself -- the interface, the features, and so on. Keep in mind that this on-line service is still in its formative stage, and you have the opportunity to help design it the way you think it should be designed. All Bill and David need are your comments and suggestions. So log on (603-882-1599) and drop us an e-note.
One of my favorite articles in this issue is Costas Menico's "High-Speed Data Transfers With NetBIOS." As usual, Costas shares some neat techniques that he regularly uses at the Software Bottling Company. Good ideas come in batches, as we found out when Tom Nolan, an associate scientist for Applied Research Corp., sent in an article describing a very similar NetBIOS data transfer technique he uses at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Unfortunately, we weren't able to publish both articles, but we will be running another article of Tom's in January, in which he provides the tools for a complete real-time PC-based data acquisition system (his area of speciality), including a schematic for the hardware and the source code for the software. This is one article I can't wait to get into print.
So you think data communications is one area of computing that's getting easier? If so, you might want to talk to Ed Dowgiallo, architect of the DBMS Decathlon benchmark suite and head of the DBMS Labs. (DBMS is another sister publication of DDJ.)
Ed spent the past summer (and then some) setting up the DBMS Labs test bed, aging several years in the process. The initial configuration of the test bed, says Ed, was an Everex 386, Step 25 server with five AT-class PCs, several Archive tape drives for backup, several Tandon DataPacs for transporting data, and various combinations of networking hardware and software. The project initially rolled along like a new Volvo, but when one vendor canceled development of some of its drivers, the wheels came off, and the task of getting anything to talk to anything else quickly turned into a nightmare.
I hope Ed gets the time and opportunity to describe the nightmare, if not for DBMS or DDJ, maybe for LAN Technology (yet another of DDJ's sister publications). I'd like to think that I did my part to keep the project running by taking Ed to Donovan's, his and my favorite local eatery, for an occasional lunch and a requisite reality check.
Just to underscore the fact that communications have never been easy, I'm reminded of a modem project at a company where I used to work. The goal was to build a 300/1200-baud auto-dial, auto-answer modem. (Yep, this is back in the days when 1200 baud was still cutting edge.) Pretty straightforward, right? The modems were built, the manuals written, the boxes printed, and the ready-to-ship packages were assembled at the warehouse. About that time, one of the engineers discovered a problem. It seems that, for some reason or another, the modem didn't work at 1200 baud after all.
I don't know who made the final decision on what to do, but it was quite simple. The crates were unpacked, the boxes and manuals thrown away, the labels on the modems peeled off, and the 300/1200 baud selector switch removed. New labels (sans mention of 1200 baud) were stuck on, new manuals and boxes printed and packed, and you guessed it, the company introduced a new, state-of-the-art auto-dial/auto-answer 300-baud modem.
Such is life and, as Don Smith says later in this issue, the chaos of communications.
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's Journal