On Sun, 12 Nov 1995 01:47:33 GMT James Herod said:
>An open letter to Hewlett-Packard ALLBASE/NET management:
>While we are on the subject of PC API and various transports, I'd like
>to wonder *LOUDLY* about the status of Lan Workplace vis-a-vis PC API.
 
[... lack of Lan Manager support snipped...]
 
At the risk of possibly sounding like the devil's advocate, I firmly
believe that you are barking up the wrong tree (sort of).  The long
battle over networking stacks is coming to a closure, and the answer
is WINSOCK.DLL.  If your stack doesn't have it, bug them about it. Even
though the underlying layers are still varied (ODI,NDIS,packet driver,etc)
the future is clear.  WINSOCK is plug-and-play (with robust winsocks).
 
The problem lies with legacy software which is not yet winsock compliant.
I'm not familiar with LAN Workplace, but if it doesn't support WINSOCK, or
it's implementation of WINSOCK doesn't fly with ODBC, beat them over the
head.  Nobody is going to spend money to make their networking software
backward compatible with proprietary stacks.
 
>Come on, HP, you can do better than this.  Pretty please, won't you,
>can't you fix this problem, before people around here get it fixed
>in their minds that HPs can't be used for serious purposes?
 
I'd rather they spend their time on 32-bit ODBC and OpenView (albeit OpenView
is an oxymoron at present).
 
[\] Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>