Telecommunications Tutorial ‐ Part 4
| Pages | 292-296 |
| Published date | 01 April 1990 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb044995 |
| Date | 01 April 1990 |
| Author | A.E. Cawkell |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Telecommunications Tutorial
Part
4:
software, networks
and file transfers
A.E.
Cawkell
Citech
Ltd,
PO Box
565,
Iver,
Bucks,
SL0
0QZ,
UK.
How much do you need to know?
Having gently (I hope) reprimanded Charles Oppenheim
(everyone knows Charles) about his cavalier attitude to Infor-
mation Theory (Cawkell 1990), I received a letter from him
saying "I watch television but have no understanding of how
it works. What's more I do not need to have such knowledge
in order to make better use of it".
This comment could
be
made equally well about numerous
aspects of Information
Technology.
Unlike
the edges
of a tele-
vision receiver cabinet IT has no definable edges, so perhaps
the point is even more valid; define your edge and don't at-
tempt to become informed about the detail out-
side it.
I
will not waste space arguing the point in
this article. It is about telecommunications —
which happens
to be
one of those very IT aspects
just mentioned. How much do you need to know
about it?
I suppose it depends on the circumstances.
Take the case of Jacky Conroy from the Poly-
technic of Central London (Conroy 1990). The
library network, on four sites, which she de-
vised, may well be the biggest in the UK — see
fig. 1 (which is slightly misleading). The box
marked 'yak
libertas'
represents
a VAX
machine
running the Libertas library
system;
it has
36 Mb
of memory and 1.8 Gb of disk.
Conroy had two things going for her — a
helpful computer department and an available
VAX 8600. DEC are well known for their liberal
attitude towards connectivity. My guess is that
this enabled her to concentrate on the services
aspect of
the
network, leaving the technicalities
to Ray Pretty et al in the computer department.
Telecommunication scenarios
This series is primarily about telecoms between
computers/terminals where the complexity of
computer software is greater than telecommunications and is
almost inextricably bound up with it. Almost all telecoms
software takes account of the computer environment. Accord-
ingly it is impossible in evade some discussion about files,
MS-DOS,
OS/2 etc.
In this context the purpose of telecoms is to transfer
infor-
mation files between computers so that the file is correctly
stored in the receiving machine and contains all the informa-
tion sent by the transmitting computer.
Once again it is necessary to distinguish between
two
basic
scenarios with contrasting 'orders of difficulty'. The situation
in practice will probably lie between the extremes.
(1) Easy. The communicating computers are on the same
site where all equipment has been purchased by one
vendor and identical software is installed on all
machines.
(2) Difficult. Communication is between different sites
owned by different organisations with multi-vendor
procurement policies.
Under situation 2, a correctly stored file received from an-
other organisation may not necessarily be presented to the
recipient as the sender intended. For example the text in a text
file composed using Wordstar WP software might be stored
exactly as sent but when called up might not appear at all on
the screen. Alternatively it might appear as one continuous
paragraph interspersed with meaningless
symbols,
or it might
appear perfectly.
292 The Electronic Library, Vol. 8, No. 4, August 1990
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