One of the joys of having Unibase by DMAC (current release 7.45i) written in POSIX compliant ANSI C is porting it to a new box. DMAC's policy of continuing to port to any POSIX compliant operating system if we can have the box here at DMAC for support is great. We did this port this summer to the Sun Solaris Ultra 5 system.

Gary Nelson of DMAC says that the vendor hardware technical support for the Solaris system was great. I can vouch for the quality of the POSIX ansi C compilers and operating system. DMAC's client can vouch for the speed of the big sister of DMAC's Ultra 5 at the client's site.

The slower Solaris Ultra 5 System here at DMAC was no slouch. It ranked as the second fastest system in DMAC's stable of servers. Only the Tandem (Silicon Graphics) server was faster.

For those not familiar with the UNIX versus NT server performance wars -- a rough rule of thumb is "if cpu cycles are available (i.e. idle time available) UNIX with terminal emulation workstations is ten times faster than the NT server with Windows (95/98/NT) workstations." This difference is not a hardware difference; it is a difference in efficiency of the software.

DMAC's terminal emulation package preference for the terminal workstations is KERMIT. Gary was able to work with a different terminal emulator at the customer's site which was even nicer. KERMIT is almost free from Columbia University; that is why it is DMAC's preference.

The book, "Using MS-DOS Kermit, Second Edition" by Christine M. Gianone has a copy of MS-DOS Kermit attached. "Kermit 95, Communications Software for Windows 95" from Manning Software, Inc. has the Windows 95/98 software. The book, "Using C-Kermit Communications software, second edition" by Frank da Cruz and Christine M. Gianone provides instructions for obtaining Kermit for most other platforms.

The DMAC client who supplied the Sun Solaris system is hoping other clients will join him in providing the maintenance and support of the Sun system as well as sort of a mini users forum within the DMAC client environment.