EMCA'S GEMSERVICE
A New Approach to Incompatibility and Complexity
by Tom Miezejeski
(from a discussion in the ENA Business Cluster)


To get things started I would like to tell everyone here about a
company that I discovered since I made my original comment about
the problem of incompatibility and complexity (in sending E-mail
and in conferencing on multiple systems).

I called on the Southern New England Telephone Co. in an attempt
to interest them in offering CC as one of the their
Teleconferencing services, since SNET has always been one the
most innovative operating companies in the Bell system. In our
discussions I learned that they have a distribution/marketing
agreement with Electronic Mail Corporation of America (EMCA). At
their suggestion I met with EMCA's president Robert Momon. Here
are some of the key items:

EMCA was started about six years ago, but only started offering
its services about 18 months ago. The first four years were
spent on R&D.

To date they have spent about $7 million on R&D. Mr. Momon was
very proud of how small this number was in relation to what
others have spent developing electronic mail, etc.

EMCA is focusing on large groups with a common interest. This
could include Fortune 500 Companies but not exclusively.

While I hesitate to use the word "simply," simply stated, EMCA
links all networks public and private. This service is called
GEMSERVICE.

GEMSERVICE accommodates all line types, line speeds from 50 to
19200 bps; character sets of ITA#2, ASCII, and EBCDIC; link
level protocols of X.25, X.75, HDLC, 2780, 3780, 3270; and the
spectrum of asynchronous protocols. The networks available
include AT&T, MCI, GTE, SBS, RCA, United Telecommunication,
McDonnell-Douglas, Western Union, and the telex service
providers. They do all this through a network control facility
located in their office in Connecticut.

If you want to deliver a message to someone that does not have a
computer or terminal connected to any of the above they will
send the message via mail or courier service, depending on the
priority.

As you might guess, they accomplish all this by storing all the
communication parameters needed to get from one point to another
in a database. They have also created all the electronic bridges
from one system to another by establishing their own mail box or
boxes on all the systems. Their customers then use a menu driven
system to send a message to someone, and all they have to
specify is who the message goes to and the priority.

The way that I understand the system, I could upload and
download from this conference, but unfortunately I could not
work with the note database online. On the other hand it looks
like we are a lot closer to the global network that is easy to
use.