From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 22:27:33 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Micromoney CryptoMango?
Message-ID: <v04003918b0e1255d2b83@[139.167.130.248]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




--- begin forwarded text


Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 08:52:16 -0500
From: rah-web <rah@shipwright.com>
Reply-To: rah@shipwright.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: rah-web <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: Micromoney CryptoMango?

http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/metcalfe.htm

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[|Opinions|]

 [From the Ether]

       January 12, 1998

       Mango `pooling' is the biggest idea we've seen since network
       computers

       Mango, in Westborough, Mass., is not your average software
       start-up. In 30 months the company has raised $30 million.
       Its first product, Medley97, has shipped, transparently
       "pooling" workgroup storage.

       And someone at http://www.mango.com really knows the
       difference between features and benefits.

       But it's not the benefits of Medley97 pooling that interest
       me. What's interesting are the features and long-term
       potential of Mango's underlying distributed virtual memory
       (DVM). Mango's pooling DVM is the biggest software idea
       since network computers -- perhaps since client/server --
       and Microsoft had better watch out.

       According to Mango, Medley97 offers transparent networking
       that's easy to use, fast, and reliable (not to mention
       secure and high fiber).

       Windows users working together on a LAN can share files in a
       pool of their combined disk storage. Every pooled PC is both
       a client and server.

       Go ahead and drop Medley97 into any PC you want to pool.
       Medley97 installs, checks configuration, and updates
       required Windows networking software. The product adds the
       PC's storage to the pool, giving you a shared, fast, and
       reliable network drive, M:/, which is available on all
       pooled PCs. For this you pay Mango less than $125 each for
       up to 25 PCs.

       Mango CEO Steve Frank was technology chief at Kendall Square
       Research (KSR), the ill-fated parallel processing company
       near MIT that was not Thinking Machines. Frank says KSR
       taught him how dishonesty doesn't work but parallelism does.

       Unlike KSR's, Mango's parallelism just has to be on volume
       platforms, such as Ethernet, TCP/IP, and Windows.

       Hence Mango.

       Underlying Medley97 are DVM processes cooperating through a
       TCP/IP Ethernet on pooled Windows PCs. The processes manage
       a 128-bit object space that copies virtual 4KB pages up,
       down, and around a distributed memory hierarchy.

       Medley97 offers ease of use by hiding continuously,
       automatically, and adaptively behind your familiar Windows
       user interface -- just below the file system APIs and above
       physical disk pages.

       Medley97 offers performance by moving files through the
       Ethernet from disk to disk and from disk to memory, closer
       to where the pages are used most.

       And Medley97 offers reliability by keeping synchronized
       backup copies of file pages on different pooled PCs.

       Mango's DVM generalizes backup and caching. Pages are copied
       for nonstop operation. Copies are moved closer to where they
       are used. Frank says it is often faster to access a page
       through Ethernet from a pooled PC's semiconductor memory
       than to access it from a local disk.

       Transaction logs are kept on all pooled PCs. The DVM detects
       when a PC drops out of a pool and copies any page that
       thereby lacks sufficient backups. When a PC rejoins a pool,
       transaction logs ensure it accesses updated pages. The
       garbage collection of deleted pages runs in the background.

       Noticing that Medley97 is available for up to 25 PCs, I
       asked the perennial parallelism question, "Does it scale?"

       Frank's answer: Yes. Medley97 is limited to 25 PCs only
       because that's all Mango has so far found time to test. With
       each PC adding resources, pool performance is "superlinear"
       as far as the eye can see.

       Well, this makes pooling the next in a long list of major
       computing paradigms: batch mainframes, interactive
       minicomputers, stand-alone PCs, PC LANs, client/server,
       peer-to-peer, thin-client, server clustering, and now peer
       clustering or pooling.

       According to Frank, Medley next needs to go from Ethernet to
       Internet. To support many pools. To add change control and
       archiving.

       Medley also needs to go beyond Windows. To pool processing
       as well as storage.

       So Medley, now written in C++, needs what else? Java.

       You can log into a Medley pool from anywhere and have your
       workgroup files available on the M:/ drive. With Java you
       could pool non-Wintel network computers.

       Well, if pooling scales, the whole World Wide Web should be
       one big pool. Mango's DVM generalizes the caching now done
       ad hoc all over the Web -- on server disks, in clusters, in
       caching farms, in proxy servers, in browsers, and in the
       file systems of PCs.

       Add Java network computers and before Frank knows it, Mango
       will be ripe for purchase if not integration by Microsoft.

                      ------------------------------

                                 [Image]

       Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and
          founded 3Com in 1979, and today he specializes in the
             Internet. Send e-mail to Metcalfe@infoworld.com.

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               Copyright (c) 1998 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.

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--- end forwarded text



-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>