MUUG Monthly Meetings for 1994-95


September 13, 1994: Object Oriented Technology

Presented by Tim Siemens, of Online Business Systems Inc. A high-level look at what object oriented technology is about, what uses it might have, and whether or not it might be appropriate for you.

October 11, 1994: Annual General Meeting

This is our annual fall meeting, where elections are held for the new board, and any other relevant group business is discussed. This was followed by a 45-minute video presentation on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode).

November 8, 1994: A Look at the World Wide Web

Presented by Dr. Richard Bochonko, of the University of Manitoba's Department of Math & Astronomy. Dr. Bochonko demonstrated various web browsers, including lynx, Mosaic, and Netscape. Several WWW sites were visited, showing the wide variety of information that has become available on the web.

December 13, 1994: Christmas Wine & Cheese

As the holiday season approached, we took the opportunity to do something a little different than our usual monthly meetings. In the spirit of the season, we had a party which gave members a chance to socialize with one another, and chat informally. A show & tell style presentation was also held, where members could showcase interesting or unique applications of computer technology that they're working with, or browse the other displays.

Displays included Sun Microsystems demonstrating Solaris applications on a SPARC 5, IBM Canada Ltd. demonstrating OS/2 Warp with Internet connectivity via a phone line to Advantis, Blue Sky Freenet demonstrating their current freenet setup via a telnet connection, and two systems from the University of Manitoba's Department of Computer Science - a Macintosh Powerbook demonstrating AppleTalk/UNIX connectivity with free software (ARNS and CAP), and a laptop PC running Linux and the new version of Netscape for Linux. Four of the five systems on display had some sort of Internet access, and Web browsers seemed to be the sofware that drew the most attention.

January 10, 1995: MUUG Online Update and Software Product Video

Unfortunately, our feature presenter cancelled on us, so we had to go with a backup plan for this meeting, which was chaired by our current vice-president, Rob Wright. Gilbert Detillieux provided a brief update on the status of the MUUG Online project, and showed some of the pages from the MUUG WWW server (well, overhead transparencies of these, at least). He then talked briefly about some of the things that still need to be done on the server, and then finished with a few words about the recent GIF controversy over licensing of LZW compression technology.

After the break, there was a video presentation on a network and system management tool with a graphical user interface, called Patrol 2.0, by BMC Software.

February 7, 1995: Network Management with HP OpenView

This month's meeting started with two short presentations by local network service providers. First off, Bill Reid, of MBnet, talked about the current status of MBnet's access server, and how this will impact current users (basically, not at all, at least until March 1996) and potential new users.

After Bill's presentation, Carey Drader, General Manager for Western Canada, of Advantis Canada, spoke about his company and its services, and what is being handled out of Winnipeg. Among its many network services, Advantis also provide Internet access services, as part of IBM Internet Connection.

This month's feature presentation was by Ed Rajfur and Susan Zuk of Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Ltd. They presented HP's very popular solution to internetworking headaches - OpenView. OpenView and its breadth of Solution Partners offer the tools and support to integrate network and system management functionality; simplifying planning, operations, and expansion of today's enterprises. OpenView allows you to perform: fault, configuration, and performance management, as well as providing a new way of managing multivendor distributed systems - HP OpenView OperationsCenter.

Susan focussed on OperationsCenter (which has many features similar to BMC's Patrol 2.0, which was shown in last month's video presentation), and demonstated how you could use it to monitor system activity and potential failures. Ed then demonstrated HP's OpenView Network Management Tool, showing how it can automatically learn about your network by monitoring network traffic, and by issuing SNMP queries to newly discovered nodes.

(Note: this meeting was one week earlier than usual, due to Valentine's Day, so there will be no meeting on February 14th. Don't forget to send flowers or a card to someone special in your life.)

March 14, 1995: Wide Area Networking

This month's speaker, Thom Wolstencroft of Cisco Systems Inc., identified the design characteristics, operational features, and constraints of today's most popular internetwork architectures, and introduced a new design for switched internetworks - the CiscoFusion(tm) architecture - that anticipates and satisfies internetworking goals into the next century.

The CiscoFusion architecture is unique because it allows sustainable growth through multilayer intelligence concurently operating at different layers of the OSI model. Cisco's strategy and product plans for implementing this new architecture were presented in a short video. Thom presented the video, and answered questions.

The short topic for this meeting was a presentation by Rick Coy of MTS on their role in setting up the Manitoba Government's new province-wide network infrastructure.

April 11, 1995: UNIX Gets Down to Business

Our speaker for April was David Hodge, Director, Technology Services at The North West Company. David presented as a local Winnipeg company, talking about what they're doing with UNIX.

David presented an overview of what The North West Company is, and how they are using UNIX in core technologies of the business. He described some of the interesting problems they face with trying to get information from various proprietary systems, in various remote locations, in a standard way. Their solution involved batching updates into work files in a consistent format, and using standard e-mail software to send them to the destination systems. This leads to a distributed architecture that is easily upgradable in sections, as new technologies come into play, while still leaving the interfaces consistent.

May 9, 1995: Microsoft Internet Assistant

Our speaker for May was Doug McLean, Senior Systems Engineer at SHL Systemhouse Inc. Doug gave a demo of Microsoft's Internet Assistant for Word for Windows, an extension to Word that allows Web browsing and Web document authoring. The software is available for downloading, for free, from Microsoft's Web server.

Rather than being a separate program, these extensions fit quite seamlessly into the standard Word for Windows application. HTML files are then supported as an import/export file type for Open and Save operations. The HTML is converted into Word document format (with extensions to support hypertext links, etc.) internally. An HTML template, containing predefined formatting styles corresponding to the HTML formatting tags, makes it easy to start a document from scratch. The web browser, although not as powerful as Netscape, is reasonable, and is integrated into Word; it is easy to switch between the document editing view, and the web browser view.

June 13, 1995: MUUG Barbecue

Another long-standing MUUG tradition is that we kick off our summer break with another party! As the warm June sun lures us away from dark, stuffy meeting rooms, what better way to get together with other UNIX users than at our annual BBQ? Bring your own meat, and be prepared to consume mass quantities.

July 1995: No meeting this month

August 1995: No meeting this month


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