NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31

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Internet Message Format | 1993-01-02 | 23.7 KB

Xref: sparky dfw.general:757 tx.general:883 Path: sparky!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!news.dell.com!natinst.com!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!west.West.Sun.COM!cronkite.Central.Sun.COM!texsun!digi!evbrown From: evbrown@digi.lonestar.org (Evan Brown) Newsgroups: dfw.general,tx.general Subject: Dallas/Ft.Worth UNIX Users Group January newsletter Message-ID: <1993Jan2.234412.3268@digi.lonestar.org> Date: 2 Jan 93 23:44:12 GMT Distribution: tx Organization: Dallas/Ft.Worth UNIX Users Group Lines: 517 Dallas Ft.Worth Unix Users Group Promoting the Education and Understanding of Unix Unix is a trademark of AT&T No. 80 Edited and Published by Evan Brown, John Fusselman, and John Bittner January, 1993 __________________________________________________________________ GENERAL MEETING INFO Meetings are held the first THURSDAY of every month (unless it is a holiday) at the Hewlett-Packard facility in Las Colinas (3301 Royal Lane, Irving, TX 75063 - 214-830-8994). Meeting schedule: 6:00-7:00 Board Meeting (all members welcome) 7:00-7:20 Socializing 7:20-7:40 Introduce Visitors and Club Business 7:40-8:30 General Interest Presentation 8:30-8:40 Break 8:40-9:30 SIG __________________________________________________________________ OFFICERS Kevin Coyle President 519-3452 Thurman Harden V Pres 817/478-5070 Robert Bair Secretary 243-2015 Evan Brown Treas+Membership 618-3525 John Fusselman Editor 458-5480 Grady Walker Hospitality 231-6101 John Bittner Newsletter System 250-3673 Administrator Brian Glenn Book Order VP 819-3112 __________________________________________________________________ THIS MONTH Thursday January 7 7PM - HP, Las Colinas Election of Officers There will be an election of officers of the DFW Unix Users' Group at the January meeting. Our elective positions are President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer/Membership Chairman. Nomina- tions will be accepted that night; anyone interested in running for office, offering nominations or voting on the nominees should make plans to attend. Sun Microsystems Tad Davis of Sun Microsystems will present a program on their pro- ducts. Special Interest Groups Don Mathis will continue discussing UNIX topics of interest. __________________________________________________________________ Upcoming Meetings Feb 4 << OPEN >> Suggestions for future meetings can be given to any of the board members. LAST MONTH Main Presentation HP Computer Strategy - Workstation Systems Group Grady Walker, a Hewlett-Packard program manager in the Workstation Systems Group, presented an excellent program with a little help from a friend, an HP 715 workstation. Grady is responsible for next generation technology, 2 to 5 years out, and multimedia. Grady's presentation gave him the chance to strut his stuff before the group, particularly because the multimedia demonstrations which comprised a large portion of his presentation included a lot of his own work. He is justifiably proud of the results; the mul- timedia demonstrations are a very impressive display of the capa- bilities of the 700 series workstations from HP and are also entertaining and informative. Grady's demonstrations featured professionally produced audio and graphics recordings; the voice overs were by professional speakers and the music was custom produced. "The ultimate in computer sel- ling," said Grady, "allow the computer to make the presentation while the salesman watches." Grady interspersed the automatically running demonstrations with technical descriptions aided by over- head transparencies. The result was a very informative presenta- tion about HP and its products. A complete writeup follows on page 2. __________________________________________________________________ Unix Trivia The powerful Unix utility, dd, has many uses such as moving files from disk to tape or tape to disk with or without additional conversions; for instance, dd is an integral part of the command string which allows the use of tar to or from a remote tape drive. In short, dd Converts and Copies files as required. So why is the command named dd? Because it's not cc - already taken by the C compiler, so a sequence based on the next letter was used, thus dd. Who said Unix commands are arcane and hard to remember? __________________________________________________________________ GENERAL INFORMATION CLUB BOOK ORDER Catalogs will be on hand at the January meeting to begin the pro- cess of placing a book order; our plans are to gather orders at the January and February meetings and to place the orders immedi- ately after the February meeting. For more information on the book order read the News item on a following page. As usual, all orders will be accompanied by payment in full, cash or checks only. __________________________________________________________________ HP Computer Strategy - Workstation Systems Group Grady Walker as reported by John Fusselman Grady Walker of Hewlett-Packard introduced himself by telling us that he was on jury duty all week; he got selected to serve. As a result he was able to share with us his experiences and tell us some things not to do. First, be sure your drivers license and voter registration provide identical information; otherwise, you get two opportunities to serve because of being called up twice since your name will appear on the list of prospective jurors twice. Second, do not as a member of a jury panel ask questions of the lawyers. Shy, retiring person that Grady is (Not!) he thought that surely the last thing the lawyers wanted on their jury was a truly inquiring mind belonging to someone outspoken. Puzzled by some of the lawyers' introductory presentation to the panel, he raised his hand and expressed a desire to ask a few questions of his own; the assembled lawyers, seven in all - 3 or 4 each for the plaintiff and the defendant (we're talking BIG BUCK$ per hour here!), ex- changed surprised glances and looked to the judge. "Go ahead; ask your questions," came the response. Grady thought he had thus managed to escape further service; at the least he took advantage of the opportunity to run up someone's bill, he gleefully reported. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm and in- terest were duly noted and he was selected for the jury. No, he did not wear his "Hang 'em high!" tie, having been assured that he could have been charged with contempt of court had he done so. We suppose that the next time Grady will keep a much lower profile in the courthouse. -- -- Grady began by defining for us "multimedia" as being a combination of video, audio, text, and graphics. The numerous demonstrations that followed did use all of these elements, in a very entertain- ing manner. The result is a product that actually tells its own story, allowing the salesperson to stand aside and watch proudly as the product itself does its own song and dance. The actual technical presentation began with questions of the au- dience regarding numerous technical achievements and offerings; correct answers were rewarded with small prizes, such as candy canes, in honor of the season. The questions included such tidbits as who offers the most powerful desk top/desk side systems - HP - and other similar questions regarding not only the state of the art but the history of workstation technology. We were told that HP currently has 89,000 employees in 500 loca- tions worldwide. HP is Fortune company number 26 and has enjoyed 50 consecutive years of profitability. This level of success is due in part to the fact that HP does its own IC designs which offers a degree of control, regretfully lacking in the past. Furthermore, the current level of high volume competition in the market has led to small margins; the customer is the winner! To help gain and maintain customer loyalty in this fiercely com- petitive environment HP provides upgrade paths - typically through board swaps - of all old architectures they ever produced; an HP 400 or 425 can be upgraded to a RISC processor. This program, we were told, is a loss leader, but it protects the customer which helps gain customer loyalty in the long term. Hewlett-Packard's RISC product line dates from the assembly of the "RISC Research Team" in 1982. The first version of the architec- ture was completed in 1983 and the entire family was complete in 1986. Finally, the first Precision Architecture shipment was made in 1987. Accomplishments of this team include the first single chip 32 bit CPU, used in the HP9000. In March of 1991 the Series 700 family of workstations and servers was introduced; the initial models were the 720, 730, and 750. At that time the most powerful offering on the market was the RIOS from IBM; the best value - most power for the money - was the Sun SPARC. The 730 was - and is - such a superior product that it is still competitive, beating the best new offerings from anyone else. In February of 1992, new, low cost workstations, the 35 MHz 705 and 50 MHz 710 models, were introduced. The key to the power and success of HP workstation is the Preci- sion Architecture which is fully scalable, assuring upwards software compatibility; there may be hardware features that older software cannot access and utilize to best advantage, but at least new systems are usable to some degree until new software is creat- ed to utilize all of the new hardware. For example, perhaps a pro- gram was developed on a system with 16 CPU registers; such a pro- gram will run on a later version of the system which has been scaled up to have 64 registers. Of course, the old program will not utilize the new registers, but it will at least run as well as it always had run. Hewlett-Packard designers take care to balance the overall design of their workstations; this means that increasing processor per- formance is accompanied by increasing clock speed, increasing VLSI density and advanced multichip modular packaging, and faster memory. Grady passed around sample motherboards from HP worksta- tions to allow us to see HP designs for ourselves; he told us that the RISC implementation was initially a seven chip set that was reduced to five, then two and now one chip which incorporates a floating point unit (FPU) and the CPU into that one chip - which is immediately identifiable by its $30 cylindrical multidisk heat sink! Earlier versions were able to get by with ordinary finned heat sinks; the power consumption of this latest offering requires a more effective heat sink design, one which incorporates a pair of parallel disks about 2 inches in diameter and about 1/4 inch apart with the nearest disk being 1/4 inch above the case of the IC. Clearly an impressive amount of heat can be dissipated by this black heat sink, an indication the underlying silicon chip has a very large number of gates capable of operating at an extremely high clock rate. In addition to the advances in performance offered by new hardware, HP claims a 9 to 18% increase in performance on changing to the latest version of their operating system; HP/UX version 9.0 has recently been announced. In response to questions from the audience regarding disk I/O per- formance in high performance workstations, Grady delivered a short discourse on SCSI busses. Grady began, "All SCSI's are not created equal" and went on to explain that the SCSI bus specification is very open and extensive - "not all is implemented by everyone" - hence SCSI2. Grady expects another pass at a SCSI standard, then the industry will have to move on to something else. Asked about IPI, Grady pointed out that that disk interface specification is proprietary. In the area of group programming and group usage of the computing environment, HP offers Shared X under which two users anywhere on the net may share the same image; either user's changes or addi- tions to this image are thus equally visible to the other. Three dimensional images may be shared under Virtual Memory X, VMX. Similarly, the Phigs Extension on X, PEX, allows image sharing between workstations. Near the end of the presentation came the obvious question after the many minutes of auto-demonstration we had observed, "How many megabytes of disk storage were taken by the displays we've seen?" About a quarter of the internal 1 gigabyte disk drive was taken, we were told, about 250 megabytes of video and CD quality sound. In conclusion, Grady Walker stated that HP is a leader on stan- dards. Furthermore, their incorporation of the graphics and CPU into the same board means that they are scaled together. With off- line graphics, when the CPU is swapped, the user could still be stuck with the same old graphics interface, thus gaining little net improvement in perceived system performance. At this point the audience began to grow restless, due to the length of the presentation; it was time for a break. Seizing the opportunity by stating that "the mind can only absorb what the butt can endure, too long a wait and your attention wanders," Gra- dy called up a full color (8 bit) image in an X window and then proceeded to click and drag the image - the full image; not an outline of the window but the intact image in all its glory fol- lowed the mouse cursor about the screen! Yes, this may only demon- strate impressive graphics performance, but keep in mind that an underlying theme of the entire presentation was balance - matched processor, graphics, memory, and disk I/O performance. All aspects of the performance of the demonstration equipment were thus indi- cated to be of the highest level. Some of the numbers presented by Grady as part of his conclusion are fascinating. A slide showed that whereas the current top level of performance of workstations is 77.5 specmarks, the next level is well over 100, advancing to well over 500 specmarks by 1995. Clock rates are expected to advance from today's top of 66 MHz to 100 then 250 MHz by 1995. Tomorrow's system will be able to access multi-terabytes of disk, not today's 236 gigabytes, and will feature 16 gigabytes of RAM, up from today's 384 megabytes and the soon to be available 768 megabytes. The higher clock rates will be made possible by advances in semiconductor manufacturing allow- ing gate widths of 0.35 microns, down from the current 1 micron and new 0.8 micron gate widths. System throughput is expected to advance from today's 8 Mbytes per second to 12 or more in the next systems release, to more than 50 Mbytes by 1995. Although the steepness of the curve - a quintupling of system per- formance in little more than 2 years - seems unlikely on first ex- amination, consider that advances in computer architecture and software will make possible by 1995 multiprocessor systems, in which the processors will each offer 4 way processing with the pipelining offered by HP's Super Scalar architecture. In other words, not only will processors be considerably more powerful by 1995, but several of them may be incorporated into a single system thereby multiplying their power. __________________________________________________________________ SPONSORS We want to recognize the following companies for their support. Grady Walker (214)231-6101 Leader in UNIX technology Hewlett Packard 3301 Royal Lane Irving, TX 75063 Paul S. Levine (214)714-0324 High Performance NFS file servers Auspex Systems, Inc. 1231 Greenway Drive, Suite 230 Irving, TX 75038 David Hayes metro(817)929-9179 Vendor-Independent Network Consulting N-Team, Inc. PO Box 201894 Arlington, TX 76006 Lou Marchant metro(817)589-0949 Tools for building Quality Software Programming Research Corporation 8701 Bedford Euless Road, Suite 520 Hurst, TX 76053 Alma Weaver (214) 669-3800 Placing Contract Technical Personnel Oxford & Associates, Inc. 11910 Greenville Ave, Suite 512 LB#24 Dallas, TX 75243 Richard Blickenstaff (800) 932-2372 Provides computer consulting resources Enterprise Systems Associates, Inc. 7041 Koll Center Parkway, Suite 260 Pleasanton, CA 94566 Ken Hatten (214) 453-7264 GTE Directories Corp. P.O. Box 619810, Cube A1-334 D/FW Airport, Texas 75261-9810 Garry Clark (214)746-4343 Telebit Corporation 1950 Stemmons Freeway, Suite 5037F Dallas, TX 75207 Rob Kolstad (800) 800-4BSD Berkeley Software Design, Inc. 3110 Fairview Park Drive, Suite 580 Falls Church, VA 22042 E-mail: bsdi-info@bsdi.com Becky Swanson (214) 660-4202 Benchmark Publications Group,Inc. P.O. Box 180222 Arlington, TX 76096-0222 Robert Bair (800) 288-1110 Resource Solutions International 3030 LBJ FRWY. Suite 300 Dallas, TX. 75234 E-mail: 451-5669@MCIMAIL Excellence in UNIX Technology Consulting Don Mathis (214) 238-8744 Lone Star Industrial Company 12311 Cross Creek Dallas, TX 75243 INTERPHASE Corporation (214) 919-9358 13800 Senlac Dallas, TX 75234 __________________________________________________________________ The UNIX Job Market Terry Stubbs with North Dallas Consulting (214) 783-9292 is look- ing for 20+ UNIX/C programmers with 2 or more years of experience. Bill Jackson with The McClane Company (214) 239-1199 is looking for 10 to 20 contract programmers to work in the Tennessee area on mainframe systems in cobol, IMS/DB & IMS/DC, and batching. JCS Consulting: Contact Nancy Deanaur at 458-1609. Resource Solutions International: Contact Robert Bair at 214-243- 2015. Lear Data: Contact Cynthia Kamel at 214-360-9008. Computer Professionals Unlimited: Contact Zip Zapotocky at 214- 233-1773. Evan Brown will bring a printout from the network News group <misc.jobs.offered> to the meeting. Please do not remove the printout, Evan only brings one copy to the meetings. __________________________________________________________________ In The News Election of Officers As the anouncement on page 1 urges, please plan to attend the January meeting to help nominate and elect a new slate of officers for DFW-UUG. Kevin Coyle regrettably will not be able to continue serving as President due to professional and personal demands on his time. Book Order VP The officers of DFW UUG want you to help us welcome Brian Glenn, our new Book Order VP. Brian is related to John Glenn; John's his uncle in fact. John lives in Michigan - and is not now nor ever has been a US Senator. (This is what happens when one asks a silly question; yes, we asked if he were related to John Glenn). Brian's daytime phone number is (214)819-3112; the corresponding mailing address is 201 Regal Row, Dallas, 75247. Current plans are to have the publishers' catalogs at the January meeting and to place a book order at the February meeting. Of course, orders will be accepted in January as well, but we want to give everyone a chance to hear about the order and respond before the order goes out. Brian plans to place orders on a regular basis, more or less often depending on the time and effort in- volved. C. E. Weekly Thanks to Ted Paone there will be on hand at the January meeting a copy of Contract Employment Weekly, the pulse of the temporary technical industry a national (and international) compendium of contract recruiter advertisements and news relating to contract employment. In addition to weekly printings mailed to subscribers, the publisher maintains a database of subscribers - your partici- pation is optional - for the convenience of recruiters and poten- tial employers. Subscriptions mailed within the US are $55 per year (52 issues) or $30 for 15 issues; there is also a special trial subscription of 5 issues for $15. A limited number of copies of the subscription form will be available for those interested. __________________________________________________________________ C TAPES To obtain the use of one of the three sets of the C training tapes, simply call Grady Walker and either Grady or his coordina- tor will assist you. If this is the first you have heard of these tapes, they are excellent for anyone needing an introduction to C programming or simply to brush up on the finer points of C and their use is free to members. The tapes were professionally pro- duced by AT&T and are well worth the time it takes to view them for anyone other than the most skilled C programmers. __________________________________________________________________ ADVERTISEMENTS NOTE: Ads will be printed on a space-available basis as a service to members of the DFWUUG [Ed.] - o - Networks that net, workstations that work. We connect anything to anything (almost). If your network is getting the better of you, get help from the best. N-Team. Inc. metro 817-929-9179 - o - Mac to Unix Connectivity: Apple consultant with extensive Unix ad- ministration and network experience will help your Macs and Unix systems communicate and share printers and data. Call Tom Karches at (214)942-9459 - o - Software Engineering provides expertise in object-oriented pro- gramming, specializing in the application of O-O techniques to real-time programming problems using C++ and UNIX or MS-DOS. Call Jack Carden at (214) 418-6283. - o - Benchmark Publications Group, Inc. offers a full array of document preparation services, as well as publishing consulting. For ad- ditional information and literature contact Becky Swanson at (214) 660-4202. - o - For employment and consulting opportunities contact Howard Olpin, Stephens Recruiting Group, Computer Division. Phone 214-233- 8575. Howard has 32 years of experience in software development and 11 years in UNIX. Windows, C++, with UNIX+DOS especially HOT now. __________________________________________________________________ Other UNIX Meetings: The CACTUS (Austin UNIX Users Group) meets the third Thursday of each month at the Dell computer building. The HOUNIX (Houston UNIX Users Group) meets the third Tuesday of each month. The HUGS (Houston SunMicrosystems UNIX Users Group) meets at the Houston Sun Office at 12 Greenway Plaza on the 15th floor. The San Antonio UNIX Users Group meets the third Wednesday of each month at the Sun Microsystems office. For more information contact Evan Brown. __________________________________________________________________ -- ------------------------------------------------ Dallas / Ft.Worth UNIX Users Group Evan Brown evan@dfwuug.lonestar.org