As those of you who follow the comp.sys.apple2 groups know, there never
was an ethernet board for the apple2, and the one that apple designed for
the 2gs never went into large scale production. This annoys me, since
the gs is certainly capable of running network applications - it comes
from the factory with appletalk/localtalk. So I've been thinking about this
problem for a while.
Before I go into my "solution", I should mention that I'm in no way an
electronic engineer, and the odds of my even attempting to do this on my
own, let alone succeeding, aren't very good. But it seemed like an idea
at least worth sharing, on the grounds that maybe one of you who IS an
engineer could make some bucks inventing this thing.
My idea is this: build an ethernet board for the apple2 series with the
following parameters: 1. it looks to the system exactly like a localtalk
board, only faster. 2. it has enough brains to analyze outgoing frames to
see if, in fact, what is being sent is ip encapsulated in appletalk. If so,
de-encapsulate it and transmit it as straight IP. - this is a software issue,
really, but it needs to happen in the firmware of the ethernet board, so...
3. It has enough brains to analyze incoming frames and determine if in
fact the frame is an IP frame. If so, encapsulate it in appletalk and
feed it to the system.
4. It has a way of turning all this brainpower off and being driven with a
normal ethernet driver running on the host system.
5. It can do any translation between appletalk and ethertalk so the machine
can talk to it's Macintosh kin.
My reasoning for all the shenanigans with appletalk and ip is this: no
standard mechanism exists for talking to an ethernet board in an apple2.
However, the GS comes with atalk drivers in rom, and you can get them for
earlier apples, and a lot of software does do tcp-ip over appletalk,
assuming it's going to be talking to an appletalk/IP router downstream.
Caviets:
I haven't looked at the appletalk/ethertalk/localtalk protocol to make
sure what I'm suggesting is sane. Same goes for tcp-ip over appletalk.
There's a standard for this stuff, but I haven't looked it up yet.
Anyway, that's my idea. Feedback will be greatly appreciated.
--
Jim Strickland
jim_at_calico.litterbox.com
--
By Caffeine alone my mind is set in motion.
Through beans of java thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes.
The shakes become a warning - I am in control of my addiction!
By Caffeine alone my mind is set in motion.
Adapted from the Mentat chant of _Dune_
Received on Tue Apr 29 1997 - 17:01:16 BST