Date : Wed, 03 Jun 1987 06:28:13 MDT
From : Rick Conn <RCONN@SIMTEL20.ARPA>
Subject: Re: zcpr3.3
Hello, Peter,
Thanks for your message on ZCPR 3.3. The basic story is that I'm
not involved with Echelon wrt ZCPR any more, and I've handed over ZCPR 3.x,
TERM3, DISCAT, etc to them so they can continue to support the Z System
users. Jay sage and others are merrily hacking away at the Z System, building
upon the ideas in my original ZCPR3, mutating it as they desire.
In the meantime, I'm working on two main thrusts: Ada and a
new ZCPR 4.0 (at least, that's what it is called at this time). I talked
about both at the last Trenton Computer Festival and can probably make
the ZCPR 4.0 information available if anyone is interested.
In the Ada arena, I manage the Ada Software Repository on SIMTEL20.
The introduction of Ada technology is also a big part of my main job.
In the ZCPR 4.0 arena, I'm back in the original environment
that spawned ZCPR 3.0. There is no time pressure, no delivery dates, and
complete freedom to create. There is also no requirement to deliver at all,
so I really don't know if what I am working on will materialize in the
user community. At one point I was working on ZCPR 3.3, moving in the
direction of my current ZCPR 4.0; the effort was quite large, leading to
something larger than the original ZCPR 3.0 and TERM3 combined. The ZCPR 3.3
that Echelon is supporting is not the original ZCPR 3.3 at all, but a completely
different effort headed by Jay Sage that is a fraction of the original
ZCPR 3.3 effort. That original ZCPR 3.3 is now the ZCPR 4.0 I'm working
on.
The bottom line is that the Echelon effort is available to the
users now (i.e., the ZCPR 3.3 of Jay Sage). Continue to follow it
and enjoy the work of Jay and the others involved. The work I'm
doing may or may not be released some day, and you can see then if you
want to continue with them, move to mine, do both, or whatever. To the
user community, this should be a win-win proposition.
Rick Conn