On Mon, 5 May 2008, Jules Richardson wrote: The ersatz token-passing protocol used with Atari STs and MIDI might qualify if anyone used it for anything more serious than a cool hack. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

If we are going to discuss the WORST systems, surely we can't leave out the TRS80 casstte port system that RS came up with for classrooms!

Eric Smith wrote: Our school system had one, back in 1981. There was a panel that was a mux/demux to 24-ish diskless model 3s. The cassette in/out from each of these came to the mux/demux box, through a selector switch, to the teachers model 3 w/dual floppy system. At the start of a lesson, the teacher would tell the students, OK, type "CLOAD<RETURN>" now. The teacher would load the lesson program into memory, then type "CSAVE" to broadcast it to all the listening machines. I believe it was bidirectional. To upload, the teacher would select one of the 24 machines to listen to and the CLOAD/CSAVE was swapped. OK, so it depends on the notoriously unreliable TRS-80 cassette interface, and on the cooperation of 24 clueless sixteen year olds. What could possibly go wrong? Truthfully, it was probably more reliable than CSAVE/CLOAD with a cassette since there was no gain/bias/speed variation to contend with, and it was probably about the cheapest solution to the problem. As a side note, I had learned to program on BASIC on the school's wang 2200 computers, then I started programming in assembly on the TRS-80s that were available. The summer before my senior year the high school placed an ad looking for people to write educational programs for the 50 or so model 3s they had just bought. At the time there wasn't a lot of off the shelf software for what they wanted, so they wrote it themselves. They were paying $10/hr, much more than the $5/hr I was getting paid to program Apple IIs. I applied and got rejected, and I heard they hired a number of college-level CS majors. At the start of the following school year I had to do a couple weeks (1 hr/day) of "Computer Orientation", which all the teachers and students had to go through. There were some lessons on how to type, how to load a program, and the very rudiments of programming in BASIC. I looked at the source code of the programs they had developed and saw that the college CS majors weren't any more qualified than me (often less) to write those programs. I was even more shocked when I later read that the $200K the school had spent on the computers and software development were more than defrayed when they sold the rights to their software to some publishing house for more than $200K.

On Monday 05 May 2008 19:38, David Griffith wrote: I don't remember running into those, how were they interfaced? And used with what sort of equipment? -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

That's PhoneNet, most likely. I still have a PhoneNet segment here for some of the non-Ethernet capable machines. And what's wrong with VHS tape for backup? *pats Alpha Micro* -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Maybe this world is another planet's hell. -- Aldous Huxley ----------------

As long as it's not a crapola player, it works well. The problem is that people kept buying their local crapola West Elbonian VHS player. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Never eat more than you can lift. -- Miss Piggy ----------------------------

Tony Duell wrote: This reminds me of the good ol'e AppleTalk, later renamed to LocalTalk once they had their ethernet version. I had a very nice, small network at home, long before ethernet, and it worked very nicely. Connected a Mac XL, IIcx, a PC, and a TI microlaser printer, all by phone cabling. I had to buy something called a CoActive plug which seemed to me to be a parallel port to Z8250 interface (since PC UARTs wouldn't go as high as 230Kbps) and had custom software to talk to AppleTalk. Of course, filenames were munged at 8.3, since this was the good old (or rather bad old) DOS days. It's funny how they use CSMA/CA on this network instead of CSMA/CD, and when ethernet came out, they continued to use the same protocol until nearly modern days where they switched to encapsulating Appletalk packets inside TCP/IP frames. I was almost like they were re-inventing Ethernet. :-) I suppose they could have actually ran ethernet over phone cables, but probably someone thought they had a better way to control collisions; perhaps they did. Of course there was nothing but trouble with early Ethernet switches and EtherTalk since they continued to use CSMA/CA for quite some time. I guess there's nothing quite like the not invented here syndrome.

Jules Richardson wrote: Dunno about networking, but when you get 'round to general protocols, let me know and I'll dazzle you with the horridness that is the CBM IEC protocol. And, if that does not phase you, I can then relate how vendors abused it to get more speed. Jim