11 Oct
2010
11 Oct
'10
4:33 p.m.
On 10/11/10 6:30 PM, Mark Davidson wrote:
It would take some digging, but I've got more than one of these
beasties, and I've also got the Wollongong software (as well as a LOT
of diskettes for the Unix PC; I rescued a 3 machine setup from an
owner who appears to have purchased every single option he could get
his hands on). I've even got the 'black binder' which is the
technician's field notebook for repairs, I believe. I can look at it
and see if there's anything useful in it. I loved rescuing these
machines and have set up 2 of them from the original (25 year old)
diskettes, but I haven't had time to do much more than that.
I've done tons and tons with these machines, but haven't been into
them in-depth for about twenty years. I sold and serviced them when
they were new, and had one at home around 1988 or so. LOVED it!
What I did NOT love, however, was the horrible IP stack that
Wollongong slapped together for that Ethernet card. It's one of the
most crash-prone pieces of software I've ever seen, and when the IP
stack crashed, it took down the entire machine.
I got one again (thanks yet again Mark Tapley and Robert Klar!) about
eight years ago, and while I don't often have a chance to fire it up, it
sits proudly on display. It's a good design and I like it a lot.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I don't presently have one, but if I do ever run
across one, I'd want
to make sure I had a "StarLAN" card (1Base5, for the pedants in the
crowd) - I even have a few official StarLAN transceivers and such -
they work fine on a 10BaseT network.
I don't know anything about the StarLAN software for the UnixPC. The
Ethernet card came with a port of the BSD IP stack done by The Wollongong
Group. Because the kernel is System V Release 2, they had to implement
select() in a user space library, and it ONLY works with network sockets,
and not with native devices. This makes it challenging to get any
non-trivial networking software ported.