Digital Responds to Hyper-Ethernet TEWKSBURY, MA, April 1, 2010 -- Digital Equipment announced today its new DECnet Phase XVIII Architecture. In response to recent Xerox and Wang improvements to Ethernet that provide people and facility transportation across inter-node links, DEC's latest DECnet provides these capabilities as well as providing for the creation of virtual facilities and even countries. These capabilities are provided by breakthroughs in communications technology that actually use the Ether as a communications medium. Through the use of a new dedicated NANO-PDP-11/E99 gateway processor system, ETHERGATE, DECnet users can access anywhere in the Ethereal Plane. This development obsoletes teleconferencing, since meeting groups can create their own common conference rooms and cafeterias, thus resolving space, travel and dining problems. There may be a few bugs left, as some of the dissenting DECnet Review Group members have not been seen since the last meeting held in such a virtual conference facility. This breakthrough was brought about by a team effort of the Distributed Systems' Software and Hardware engineering teams in an effort to improve on their Tewksbury, Massachusetts facility. In a compromise decision, Distributed Systems will maintain an ETHERGATE in TWOOO, but it will connect directly to their new home somewhere in the Shire of their newly defined Middle Earth reality. Despite some difficulties, the scenery, windows, tax breaks, pool and racquetball courts made the relocation go quite smoothly. Engineering Network topology will not change, as all forwarding will be done by the TWOOO Ethereal Plane Router residing in the crater at the former building site. Utility packages such as Ethereal Person Transfer (EPT) and Ethereal Facility Transfer (EFT) provide appropriate capabilities for casual users. Sophisticated users can create ($CREATE), access ($OPEN), and delete ($NUKE) ethereal entities transparently from high level languages using the Ethereal Management System (EMS) package and the Ethereal Access Protocol (EAP). An ETHERTRIEVE utility for easy interactive use will be available shortly. DECnet Phase XVIII follows on the success of the Phase XVI ability to access everyone's Digital Professional wrist watch computer system. This led to the current Phase XVII architecture, which has routing capabilities that allow direct communications with the entire Earth population's Atari home video games. Distributed Systems architects are hard at work on the next phase of DECnet that will include multi-plane existence network management (using the NIECE protocol) and galaxy level routing using 64K bit addresses. Digital will continue to support its Gateway products into the Prime Material Plane. These products include an IBM ANA (Acronym-based Network Architecture) Gateway, the TOLKIEN product that allows control of all ring based networks, and our Mega-broad-jump-band hardware which leaps past Wang's products in the hype-weary business marketplace.