der Mouse wrote:
TCP/IP on an
8088 class machine isn't particularly new and exciting,
Oh, I don't know; *I* think this is Pretty D*mn Cool!
Well, okay, TCP on an 8088 may not be exciting. TCP using your own
code on an 8088, that rocks!
And thanks again for the testing - I watched some of your sessions in
real time by looking at the tcpdump output.
I started this project about a year ago by trying to get the packet
driver for a Xircom PE3 10BT (parallel port Ethernet adapter) to send a
packet. That worked pretty well - I had to learn how to mix x86 ASM in
my C code, but it worked. Receiving packets was a different story - the
dang Xircom packet driver was written in a non-friendly way, so
interfacing to it was not as easy as it should have been. After two
days of disassembling code, hacking, and experimenting I finally got
data in and out.
After that I needed ARP. Then I went to UDP. TCP scared me, so I
procrastinated quite a bit. I still have a bit of cleanup and testing
to do, but I'm finally over the hump again and it's back to being fun.
About six months ago I found a good ISA bus adapter for the Jr and I
tried out that Western Digital card. Wow .. compared to the Xircom on
the parallel port, it's a rocket. The Xircoms are a good solution for
limited machines, but I definitely need to reproduce the adapter card.
At some point when it is a little more polished and tested I'll put a
web page up and release it to the universe. There are a handful of
TCP/IP stacks out there already, but I think mine is going to be the
fastest by a pretty wide margin.
Part of the joy of coding is seeing others make use of the code. I'd
like to see some new/refreshed TCP/IP apps for older machines. I was
intending to do a telnet BBS, but that's going to take a lot more effort
and the audience for that is fairly limited.
Mike