11 Oct
2010
11 Oct
'10
3:11 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote about the AT&T Unix PC (7300 or 3B1):
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.
StarLAN does *NOT* operate on a 10BaseT network. The signalling is
similar, but the data rate is 1 Mbps rather than 10 Mbps. StarLAN
generally will not work with 10, 10/100, or 10/100/gig hubs or
switches. There may have been some networking equipment that could
interoperate with both StarLAN and 10baseT, but I've never found it.
For the Unix PC, there were separate cards for StarLAN and for 10 Mbps
Ethernet. The StarLAN card used the Intel 82586 Ethernet MAC chip,
while IIRC the 10 Mbps Ethernet card used the AMD Am7990 "LANCE"
Ethernet MAC chip. The 10 Mbps Ethernet card did not include a 10baseT
transceiver, but one can be connected via AUI.
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.
Eric