Macintosh and Mcintosh

From: Carlos Murillo <carlos_murillo_at_epm.net.co>
Date: Fri Sep 20 09:49:00 2002

Who would have known it; I unearthed a box that I had
that contains a product by Sun Microsystems , ca. 1987:
"TOPS: All software required to transform a Macintosh into
a TOPS network station".

Essentially it seems like Sun wrote an ethertalk driver
and an appleshare daemon for Sun workstations as well as
an appletalk solution (interface, driver, file sharing and
laserprep clients) for PC compatibles and some extra
software for the mac as well. Some of the blurb in the box
is reproduced at the end of the message. Anyway, I have
three comments and a question:

1) I did not know that Sun made unix/pc/mac compatible
solutions that early; my experience with such products was
limited to Sun's PC-NFS, which I liked a lot at the time.

2) Why the name TOPS? Isn't that the name of an OS used in
some PDP's, such as the legendary SIMTEL-20?

3) Inside the box, I found exactly the kind of appletalk connector
that I ended up building from a Farallon phonenet connector
a few days ago.

And the question:
Tne macintosh diskettes in the box carry the following
legend in the trademark attribution section:
"Macintosh is a trademark of McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., licensed
to Apple Computer, Inc."

So did McIntosh sue Apple over trademark infringement and win?
Did Apple eventually buy the Macintosh trademark from McIntosh?
I never knew about this; please clarify what happened.

Regards,

carlos.

TOPS box blurb:

Connect to other computers: TOPS opens up a whole new world of
    possibilities. You can share files not only with other Macintosh
    stations, but with IBM PCs & compatibles, Sun workstations and
    other computers connected to the TOPS network.

Share network resources: With TOPS, each network station can share its
    resources with every other station. Files accessed from a remote station
    look and behave just as if they were stored locally--even if the
    files are stored on a different kind of computer than the one you're
    using.

Print spooling: TOPS includes a desk accessory called TOPS Spool that
    handles all postscript print jobs in the background as you continue
    to work. TOPS Spool is Pagemaker compatible.

Convert file formats: TOPS includes an utility called TOPS Translators
    that converts file formats between many popular Macintosh and DOS
    applications.

Requirements: Mac 512, 512Ke, Plus, SE or II, System 5.3 and Finder 3.2
    or higher. Fully compatible with all AFP applications.


--------------------------------------------------------------
Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo_at_nospammers.ieee.org
Received on Fri Sep 20 2002 - 09:49:00 BST