Richard Levenson inquired about linking different computer platforms
and Kamiar Moin suggested a simple NFS link via ethernet to connect
a PC and a SGI.
 
Attachment of a Mac to the above, basic setup is trivial. Any
Mac with System 7.5 will have MacTCP included (earlier OS versions
had MacTCP packaged separately). Either built-in ethernet or
an ethernet board in older Macs will allow you to perform FTP
transfer of images. This can be done with shareware NCSA Telnet
or Dartmouth's Fetch program.
 
A basic networking scheme may not work if you have a lot of
casual or computer-naive users. Such folks may have difficulty
conducting a FTP session. Some sites might want to make it easy
for users to simply drag and drop folders or image icons from
any drive to another. For this ability, commercial software is
available. One way to do this is to use Ethertalk packets for
file sharing on all machines and enable peer-to-peer access.
Both SGI and Xinet sell software that allows Ethertalk clients
to mount SGI volumes while allowing SGI access to client drives.
For the Mac, Ethertalk is built-in. For the PC, Farallon sells
Timbuktu /TimbuktuTalk which allows the PC to mount and see
the SGI or Mac drives.
 
A caveat to the above scenario is that some network purists
dislike Appletalk/Ethertalk protocols in that they are relatively
'noisy' because the machines will be announcing their prescence
on a regular basis. For users, this isn't a concern but your
local administrators might want to put your machines on a subnet
(if it isnt already on one).
 
Finally, printer drivers for all the computers would have to
be installed on each machine. The printer vendor will have to
help out here.
 
daniel chin
[log in to unmask]    http://agi.org/otherD/Dan.html