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Moving from a Symbolics to an Explorer.
Many thanks for all of the useful replies on the topic of moving from a
Symbolics to a microExplorer!
There are a few discrepencies that I would like to clear up if anyone
cares to comment further.
On the question "What tape format would be best to use?":
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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 90 13:12 PDT
From: snicoud@atc.boeing.com (Stephen L. Nicoud)
The Explorer can read Symbolics carry tapes or UNIX TAR tapes.
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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 90 15:53 EDT
From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)
At the time the companies were founded I don't think there was a Lispm
tape format, so this could be tricky. There may be a utility to read
Symbolics carry tapes; ask your TI sales rep. If not, they can probably
read tar tapes, and Genera 8.0 can write ASCII files to tar tapes.
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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 90 18:14:45 CDT
From: Michael DeBellis <debellis@Andersen.COM>
In regard to tape formats: If you have a regular Explorer
with a tape drive available, you have no problem. Explorers can
read Symbolics carry tape format. However, if you have only
microexplorers tapes are a real hassle. TI's line of reasoning
was to use peripherals provided by the native machine and not to write
extra software to adapt their hardware (such as tape drives) to
Microexplorers. The tape drives and software available for the Mac
are very bad. Of course, they cannot read any Lispm formats (the only
tape drives that I know of for the Mac don't even use the same size cartridge
tapes).
Your best bet if you don't have an Explorer is to not use tapes and to
try to establish a network connection. It should be possible to get your
Symbolics and MicroExplorers to talk to each other over the network.
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Clearly, having both machines on the same network for a period of time
would be very desirable. Assuming that this is not possible and
therefore I must use a tape, am I in deep water in only having
microExplorers (as opposed to "regular Explorers") at the target site?
If so, might the best option be to use Suns (which may exist at both
sites) as an intermediary?
On the question "Will Zmail mail files be readable?":
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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 90 18:15 EDT
From: Brad Miller <miller@SOL.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>
1 not really, but sort of. You can more-or-less read in babyl files, though
some stuff has to be removed first if you use them, like keywords.
0 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 90 15:53 EDT
From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)
They both should be able to read and write Babyl and ITS format mail
files. Kbin files probably can't be read by the Explorer.
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These two answers differ somewhat. Does anyone have other items (like
keywords, or character styles) which should be stripped before
attempting to move between systems? More importantly, would there be
any problems using Zmacs on the microExplorer to fix up "by hand"
anything that I might miss? And, BTW, are files with an extension of
.XMAIL the same as .BABYL and, if not, how does one coerce one into
the other?
A few other issues which came up:
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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 90 13:12 PDT
From: snicoud@atc.boeing.com (Stephen L. Nicoud)
Poor debugger support on TI. Local variables in a frame are only accessible by
calling some strange function (EH-LOC, etc).
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This surprises me as I thought that this functionality existed at MIT.
Do others find the debugger poor?
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Date: Mon, 13 Aug 90 07:10:49 PDT
From: curte@beowulf.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Curt Eggemeyer)
5) The microexplorer would randomly hang on me. The application I ported had
a complex 4 level deep constraint frame window.
Has anyone else experienced problems like this?
7) Multiple file versions weren't supported about a year ago. I don't know if
they are now.
This also surprises me and seems like it may cause me all kinds of
problems. Anyone know if this is still the case?