From: Doug Porter <76244.315@CompuServe.COM>
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 93 04:05:33 PDT
To: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: Re: Term software dev
Message-ID: <930604110243_76244.315_CHN40-3@CompuServe.COM>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Eric Hughes asks:

> What are NASI/NCSI?  Does it cost to use them?  Is source 
available?

It's an API originally developed by Network Products Corporation 
and based on an earlier spec from Ungerman-Bass. NPC used it in 
building an async comm server for LANs. NPC called the API 
"Network Communications Server Interface" or NCSI. Novell 
licensed the technology from NPC and renamed the API to "Novell 
Asynchronous Server Interface" or NASI. Other async server 
vendors picked up on it about then as a result of Novell's 
evangelism. Serial communications software packages from 
Crosstalk to Procomm to tiny niche products started to support 
it. Then because of the end user package support, the standard 
was used for different kinds of serial connections. For example, 
we (CyberCorp) built a NASI/NCSI interface for intelligent 
Digiboards a while back.

I've never heard of anyone being charged to use the spec for 
whatever they like. At least part of the spec, the part promoted 
by Ungerman-Bass, seems to be in the public domain. We 
originally got the spec from Novell when we built a Netware 
compatible async server. I don't know of any free source code, 
but code for either end of the spec is only one or two thousand 
lines of C.

Doug