UDP on 1970's micros [was Re: NeXT]

The neat thing about using a PIC chip is that it's external... so with a little extra logic you can route it through either a parallel or serial port. UDP is User Datagram Protocol... it's good enough that you can write simple clients and servers to transfer data. Many servers can be switched from TCP to UDP services on any unix machine or a tiny daemon can be written to do the routing. So you could access a web server on the net via a TRS-80 this way. Of course it would be nice to have full TCP/IP available but it's considerably more work. There is a stack for the C64. I'd like something that is portable, a widget that plugs on the back of a variety of early PCs. Something like a box with a Z180 board, with serial and ethernet on board would be very nice for a full network implementation. Ironically the upstart company I helped "startup" does all of this in a gate level implementation [no processor required] but it's available only as an embeddable logic core for integration into things like cellular phones and kids toys. Anyway, UDP is good enough as long as you do checksums on the data that comes through. Obviously you couldn't run a web server using UDP very well. TCP/IP would be more fun because as an exercise you could host a web server on computers from the 1970's. Also if you did TCP/IP, IP, ARP and PPP all in software on a 1970's micro you probably couldn't do a whole lot else in RAM. However, a dedicated embedded SBC between your Trs-80 and your Sun Sparcstation could allow your Trs-80 to do quite a bit and would simplify data transfers to and from the net, etc. It could be made simple too... type in a small BASIC program to program your IP address and bootstrap your network connection. It could be that easy [no floppies required]. I mentioned the PIC controller with UDP first because they are small and egg-stremely cheap. Thomas Begin forwarded message: I've heard rumors of IP (not TCP/IP, just IP) being written for the C-64 (along with PPP or SLIP I assume). Apparently, the port only had IP and ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol---at the same layer as IP) as nothing else could fit in 64k. IP isn't that difficult (and uncompressed SLIP is pretty easy as well). UDP is just a user accessable (under UNIX) version (more or less) of IP (unreliable datagram protocol, but I think UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol, as a datagram protocol is unreliable by definition if I recall correctly).