15 Sep
2016
15 Sep
'16
5:40 a.m.
On 14 September 2016 at 18:15, tony duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Dare I suggest that perhaps they flopped in the states so they
tried to flog them to us :-)
I share your cynicism in general on that point, but this was sold for
_years_ by, IIRC, a little company called EQ Consultants, IIRC.
http://eqc.co.uk/
It was definitely a thing when Ethernet was still too expensive.
Here's a mini-review:
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue142/70_Getting_wired.php
* LittleBigLAN (never heard of or saw)
* The $25 Network (never heard of or saw)
Odd... They were sold in the UK as being American imports... I've never seen it in operation, but the Gemini
Galaxy (somewhat based on the Nascom, with
the same bus) had a network option. It was a little
board that hung off the parallel connector on the
CPU board. The one I have had had all the numbers
scratched off the ICs, it took me about 2 minutes
to realise that the main 40 pin IC was a dumb
UART. The rest of the board was a bit of logic
to interface it to the parallel port, a clock
generator and RS485 buffers.
Interesting. I heard of it, certainly, but I never knew of anyone who
actually used it.
Of course the common network in UK schools
in the early 80s was Econet (Acorn's network
for the BBC micro, Atom, etc).
I saw quite a few decommissioned machines with Econet adaptors, and
I've seen a demo network set up at a show in the last decade I think,
but I don't think I ever saw one in action.
I did see IEE-488 in use, both on CBM PETs and BBC Micros, in
education -- both for storage and for connecting to lab equipment.
--
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