Interactive 386 and PC-Server Module

[Daniel A. Graifer]

I just wanted to add our experiance with PC-Interface.  Prime Computer
remarkets this Locus Computing product for it's EXL series of 386 MultiBusII
machines.

The telnet type terminal emulation product (called EMulate) seems to be
excellent.  In particular, it is compatible with SuperKeys, which we have used
to drastically remap the keyboard behaviour.  The only problem we have noticed
that "switch session" (having two emulation sessions open simultaneously, and
switching between them) doesn't work, and hangs both the sessions.  Both the
terminal emulation and the file and printer services run over udp/ip, not 
tcp which surprised me.

We have not noticed the "slow" printer behaviour reported elsewhere.  Both
file and printer service slowed down noticably when Prime switched its tcp/ip
software on the host (which we've complained about.  The new package was 
supposed to be faster!)

The other feature we use extensively is the "ON" dos command.  This forks
a shell on any connected unix host and executes the remainder of the 
command line.  Commands may be run in the background by terminating them
with an ampersand (&), and accept input and output redirection.  For example
my autoexec.bat file logs me into my default unix host (stored in the DOS
environment variable DEFSYS) and then sets my PC's clock to match the unix
system time:

SET TZ=EST5EDT
SET EXPORT=TZ
ON %DEFSYS% date +%%T |TIME >NUL:

Another example is dircount.bat, which pipes the output of the dos DIR 
command through an awk script to total the sizes of the listed files.

PC-Interface will run over a serial line as well.  It's slow, but if you
take your portable home, then discover you left some vital file at work,
it prevents many wasted evenings.  Print on the office laser printer from
home, pick up the output when you arrive the next morning.

We looked at Intercon's TCP/Connect and the FTP Software Inc.'s PC-TCP
(we thought the former was an especially fine product) but settled on PC-
Interface as the more seamless connection for our purposes.  Prime didn't
have an NFS server at the time of the decision.

Conclusion: We like the product (we are using verions 2.8.7.1, the last
digit representing the revisions to the server software to support Prime's
new tcp/ip).

We have no relationship with any of the companies mentioned except as 
customers.

Dan
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-- 
Daniel A. Graifer			Franklin Mortgage Capital Corporation
uunet!dag at fmccva.franklin.com		7900 Westpark Drive, Suite A130
(703)448-3300				McLean, VA  22102