TRANSFER Programming Manual

1 An Overview of the TRANSFER
Delivery System
40970 Tandem Computers Incorporated 1–1
The TRANSFER delivery system is a high-level software product that supports the
reliable delivery of information among people, input/output devices, and processes.
The product is especially useful in situations where system resources are widely
distributed or intermittently available.
In addition to supporting standard electronic mail applications supplied by Tandem,
the TRANSFER system supports a wide spectrum of user-written applications. These
are typically business applications that link interactive environments and include such
features as:
Transmittal of data to multiple destinations
Communication among distributed applications
Scheduling of transactions for future delivery
The TRANSFER delivery system appears as a group of processes that your programs
(also running as processes) can call upon to build, maintain, and route collections of
information called packages throughout your computer system or network. Your
programs make these requests through the TRANSFER programmatic interface.
The TRANSFER delivery system maintains a database that describes TRANSFER users
and provides them with holding areas for packages and parts of packages. All
interactions between your application processes and the TRANSFER delivery system
take place through interprocess messages.
Figure 1-1 illustrates information delivery with the TRANSFER delivery system. In
this example, user A is using a customer service application, user B is accessing
TRANSFER software for administrative work, users C and D are using an order entry
application, and users E and F are accessing a manufacturing application. User A
sends one package to user D and sends another package to users C and E. The
packages move from the customer service environment through the TRANSFER
delivery system to the manufacturing and order entry application environments.