Sun <--> DEC

[Gregory Sorensen]

[sorry if this appears twice.  jammed mailer?]

Howdy, everyone:

Our lab, like many, has vaxen running VMS 4.x and also
Sun 4s running SunOS 4.  Getting them to "talk" 
(defined below) to one another has been less than 
thrilling.  We are considering acquisition of some major
instruments which are controlled either by Microvaxes running
VMS or else Suns running SunOS.  In either case, we are
going to need to achieve a higher level of integration
than we have now. I'd like to know if integration is possible.

The "talking" we need to go on consists mainly of sharing
data files (actually magnetic resonance image files, 
consisting mostly of short integers but also some floating
point data).  We have some software on the vaxen as well as
the sun 4s which we would like to use to analyze these 
data files.  We aren't (yet) looking to port code back and 
forth (although if that's doable...).

I would like to know what collective experience the "net" 
has had in sharing data and applications between VMS and SunOS.
Our limited experience shows tricky conversions between the
two in terms of byte ordering, especially in terms of floating
point.  Specifically, does X help with this?  I was hoping so from
the construct of XImage...  How about NFS?  Is it really a 
"seamless" integration of the two?  How about general DEC-Sun
interaction?

In a related vein, does (or will) DECwindows ever run on a Sun?
>From what little I've heard, DECwindows is more than an X toolkit, 
ergo less portable (?).

Thanks for your help.  

Greg Sorensen

sorensen at mgh-rnmr.harvard.edu