Advice sought on doc processing and slip on SparcStations

[bob at morningstar.com]

| From: jrg at apple.com (John R. Galloway Jr.)
|  Date: 28 Jun 90 04:15:37 GMT
|
|   My sister, who is a Tex-on-Vax expert...
|
|   1) She does a lot of equation/table/graphing sort of doc work, does
|      FrameMaker handle this well?  Is it the document processor of
|      choice on Sun these days?  If need be can FramMaker paste in TeX
|      generated stuff?

Why should she switch from TeX to FrameMaker, unless her entire new group
is already Frame-centric?  A SparcStation is a comfortable TeX engine, and
there are reasonable previewers available for both X and SunView (and,
presumably, OW).  My "document processor [environment] of choice" consists
of GNU Emacs, LaTeX, and an X dvi previewer, all running on a
SparcStation; with a PostScript printer attached to the (fast!) parallel
port of a SLAT out the back.  The best thing is that the software's all
free.

|   3) Does Sun support slip?

Sun may not (yet), but Suns do.

Get uunet.uu.net:networking/cslipbeta.tar.Z, which works fine under 4.0.3.
PPP (the new Point to Point Protocol, where you should be pinning your
future) performs even better.  I don't know whether either has run under
4.1 yet, but if not, work is likely underway.  I've seen queries on
tcp-ip, sun-spots, and sun-nets, but I don't recall seeing a response yet.
We're still on 4.0.3 until then.

|     if so what modems work best?

We've seen 1.3-1.5Kbps on FTP transfers between SPARCs connected by
Trailblazer Plusses using PPP.  Interactive traffic is reasonable.  I
haven't tried any heavy NFS activity.