Re: Ethernet

From: David Ross (watson_at_enteract.com)
Date: 2000-07-20 16:03:13

On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Richard Atkinson wrote:

> software to set up the transactions). Even then you still have the
> possibility of Ethernet data coming in far quicker than the C64 can
> process it.

Someone was trying to tackle this project at one time, although I don't
know if they are still.  Their approach was, for compatibility reasons
(not to mention all the stuff we have hanging off the expansion port
already), to use the serial port.

At first this seemed ridiculous to me, and I could only imagine the number
of resends that would be necessary to talk to the 64 over the network if
the device communicated to the computer at such a slow speed.

Then one day at work I was watching the blinking lights on the hubs in the
server room.  The collision lights were going nuts, and this is an office
of only about 50-60 people.  If I remember from my Intro to Data
Communications class, each collision requires a resend from both computers
whose packets collided.  So there's already a lot of resends going on
in an ethernet network anyways.  What are a few more?

Using the REC chip sounds good, but those are already in short supply and
I'd hate to see people cannibalizing REUs to build ethernet adapters.

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