ident $Id: README,v 1.2 1994/08/10 16:24:30 root Exp $

			ETSA V2.20 10-Aug-94
			====================

Introduction
------------

This is the first PD release of the BSD sockets implementation of the
Enhanced Transputer Server Architecture (ETSA) formerly known as the
Ethernet Multi-user Transputer System (EMTS) -- a misnomer because the
system is not restricted to Ethernet -- once sold by a company called
Paratech (RIP).

The system allows remote access to transputers using the TCP transport
protocol.  The module that runs on the transputer host machine is called
the stub.  The module that runs on the server host machine is called the
server.  The stub transparently relays packets between transputer and server.

Platforms
---------

The stub has been tested on x86/MS-DOS and x86/SVR4.* platforms with
B004-compatible transputer hardware.  The MS-DOS plaform requires either
FTP Software Inc's PC/TCP kernel (v2.05 or later) or Sun Microsystems Inc's
PC-NFS kernel (v3 or later).

Two servers are provided: the Inmos iserver and the ETSA eserver.  Both
servers have been tested on x86/MS-DOS, x86/SVR4.*, Sun3/SunOS4.1 and
Sun4/SunOS4.1 platforms.  The MS-DOS plaform requires either FTP Software 
Inc's PC/TCP kernel (v2.05 or later) or Sun Microsystems Inc's PC-NFS kernel 
(v3 or later).  If the eserver is running on SVR4 or SunOS, the eserver can 
spawn arbitrary "server extension" programs.  If the eserver is running on
SVR4 or SunOS with X windows, a transputer client can open multiple xterm 
terminal emulator windows.  If the eserver is running under SunOS, the server 
is multi-threaded.

Both the stub and server use the BSD sockets network programming interface.
They should be portable to a wide variety of platforms.  In particular, I
would like to port the stub to Linux.  In an ideal world, eserver would use
POSIX PTHREADS instead of the SunOS LWP library  -- as it is, the 
multi-threaded version of eserver is Sun-specific.

ETSA provides much of the functionality of the Inmos B-300 for free.  ETSA
is similar to PCserver except that the stub can run on a variety of platforms
(I only have x86 transputer hardware, so I have not ported the stub to SunOS).
ETSA is similar to WIServer when running eserver under Unix except it uses
X Windows instead of MS-Windows.

Documentation
-------------

An overview of ETSA is provided in the paper doc/wtc94.ps.gz.  This was
presented at the WTC 94 conference in Como (Italy), September 1994.

Please refer to the Installation Guide (doc/install.ps.gz) for instructions on 
how to install ETSA.  Do not be alarmed by the size of the installation guide!
-- it contains information on how to configure toolset software and Transputer
Development Software to use ETSA.  The basic installation of ETSA should be
straightforward.  A user guide is in doc/guide.ps.gz.

********************************************************************************
Brendan Murphy						brendan@buck.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science				Tel: 44 (0)280 828335
University of Buckingham, Buckingham, MK18 1EG, UK	Fax: 44 (0)280 828322
********************************************************************************