On Jan 21, 2014, at 10:23 AM, Tapley, Mark wrote:
On Jan 20, 2014, at 4:23 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
Just throwing this out to see what other people
think.
I suspect we're at the tail end of the usage life of devices that don't speak
IP.
I'm mostly thinking about networking devices 80's > 00's
So, what needs to be preserved? How much of this does CHM need to do? Is any other
collecting institution already covering this? How much is within scope?
Al, you are probably very far ahead of me, but I have two suggestions:
1) ?bridge? pieces - the Kindergarten example is probably a Dayna EtherPrint-T or Asante
EN/SC type device that allowed a LocalTalk network to bridge to an Ethertalk network. In
terms of long-term, serious restoration/preservation, having one of those available means
having a device that could be (maybe) deconstructed to give information about both types
of network. It also seems pretty helpful to anyone trying to restore hardware on the
less-used (LocalTalk) side.
Agreed, though I should point out that the EN/SC was actually
a SCSI-to-Ethernet converter for SCSI Macs that lacked expansion
slots (e.g. Plus, Classic, not the SE, though I used an EN/SC on
an SE when SE Ethernet cards cost their weight in gold).
LocalTalk itself is pretty well documented, at least. The book
Inside AppleTalk is a pretty great reference for all modes of
AppleTalk, both LocalTalk and otherwise. A lot of the bridges
are pretty dumb, requiring the LocalTalk side and all its
devices to be alive at boot time. I'm of a mind to make my
own that's smarter, but I need to stop pushing more projects on
my stack.
- Dave