3.1315 Computing Environments for Work and Libraries (50)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 25 Apr 90 17:17:53 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 1315. Wednesday, 25 Apr 1990.
(1) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 90 17:10:23 BST (41 lines)
From: Lee Davidson Leeds <LNP6TTLD@CMS1.UCS.LEEDS.AC.UK>
Subject: Moving from Mainframe to Distributed Environment [eds.]
(2) Date: Wednesday, 25 April 1990 9:15am CST (9 lines)
From: EIEB360@UTXVM.BITNET
Subject: 3.1313 Library Equipment; Hand
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 90 17:10:23 BST
From: Lee Davidson Leeds (0532) 333565 <LNP6TTLD@CMS1.UCS.LEEDS.AC.UK>
lnp6ttld @ uk.ac.leeds.cms1 [within U.K. univ net, JANET]
lnp6ttld % cms1.leeds.ac.uk @ UKACRL [from BITNET/EARN]
lnp6ttld % cms1.leeds.ac.uk @ nsfnet-relay.ac.uk [from Internet]
Query for Humanist
------------------
In my University we are in the early stages of moving from a
conventional mainframe system to one with more widely distributed
servers and workstations on a high capacity network. A consequence of
this will be that work which I have done for about 9 years on an Amdahl
680 (under VM/CMS) using the Oxford Concordance Program and SPITBOL on
large natural language corpora and literary texts stored on disk will
have to migrate to another system. It is likely that there will be
available in the successor system a configuration (hardware etc not
settled yet) of powerful workstations, which seems to me to a better
future home for my mainframe work than anything based on PCs. However,
there seem to be few users with experience of using such facilities,
especially where this involves teaching students, with all the
administrative and file security problems which, I am told, such
powerful machines and networks are likely to generate.
I would like to hear from anyone who has experience of doing
my sort of text-processing work -- research and teaching --
in an environment which could include the following features:
* Powerful workstations (eg Sun, Hewlett Packard, Silicon
Graphics, Dec) linked to servers by high capacity ethernet
* CD-ROM to hold text databases linked to a network of
such workstations
* Using DTP/document production software such as Framemaker and
Arbortext on such machines, especially where the user
has exploited the SGML features of such packages
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------18----
Date: Wednesday, 25 April 1990 9:15am CST
From: EIEB360@UTXVM.BITNET
Subject: 3.1313 Library Equipment; Hand
In re: Charles Ess's letter about central repositories/servers for
e-text: at Texas we're beginning to think about distributed rather than
centralized systems for this sort of thing. What are the comparative
advantages and disadvantages of centralized as gainst distributed
textbases?
John Slatin