der Mouse wrote:
Further, if
you're serious about [building an IP stack for the Lisa],
you might want to go with PPP as that would be far easier to
implement and would run without requiring a SCSI card on a real Lisa,
as well as on the emulaor.
(a) Surely you mean Ethernet, not SCSI?
Actually, we do mean SCSI - there used to be a SCSI card for the Lisa -
only worked under MacWorks, and there used to be a SCSI->Ethernet
adapter. (Much like there used to be parallel port ethernet adapters
for PC's.)
Both the Lisa SCSI card and the ethernet<->SCSI adapter are quite rare
these days, so it's not much of a solution. However, the Lisa does have
a pair of built in RS-232 ports, one of which can be used for appletalk
(localtalk) so it can go as high as 230kbps.
Of course, it's very difficult getting the Lisa to sustain much of any
serial conversation above 19.2, even with hardware handshaking, and
leaving it enough CPU cycles to do much of anything else. But then
again, if you can build a TCP/IP stack for Lunix and Con-Tiki on C64's,
it can be done on a Lisa too...
As as aside, there were lots of very strange things on SCSI busses back
in the day. Scanners were quite common, but there actually existed
printers, and even video cards on SCSI busses. :-) The SCSI video card
and ethernet card were useful for compact Macs that had a scsi port, but
no expansion slots.
The Lisa does have 3 expansion port slots, so it if you're going to
build hardware, you could easily build an ethernet controller for it,
but they would be quite expensive, and not very useful in terms of how
much bandwidth you'd get out of them. But serial ports are free as
they're built in, so only the software half is needed.
(b) SLIP would be substantially easier than PPP; in my
experience, when
you're using hardwired lines (as opposed to asymmetric dialup
connections), it's also substantially more reliable.
Very true.