[Coco] Telnet to your CoCo.. and invite 6 of your friends

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 12:17 AM, Roger Taylor <operator at coco3.com> wrote:
> At 06:53 AM 11/28/2009, you wrote:
>>
>> I've got the inbound TCP connection portion of my project completed.
>> You can now have up to 7 inbound connections to your CoCo using
>> telnet.  The DriveWire server listens on port 6809 (configurable, but
>> is there any better port? :) and binds incoming connections to the
>> next available virtual serial port on the CoCo.  Using tsmon, you can
>> have a pretty decent multiuser, internet accessible NitrOS-9 system.
>>
>> As soon as I can figure out a way to run a multi-line BBS (or when
>> Wayne decodes RiBBS ;), I'll be putting a Coco board online.  I've got
>> a spare Coco with cooling fan ready to give it a shot.
>>
>> As always, the code is free to anyone that is interested.
>> http://aaronwolfe.com/coco
>>
>> -Aaron
>
>
>
> What would the overall throughput be for 7 connections over a 115200 bps?
>  ~9600 bps?  Still, a geat accomplishment for a CoCo, and I don't even think

It's an interesting situation.  A single virtual port can get "decent"
throughput, around 19.2 right now and probably better with more
optimization.  Throughput gets pretty bad when using multiple ports
for data streams due to overhead from processing time on the bitbanger
and the processes themselves fighting to handle the incoming data.

However, multiple interactive sessions have very nice responsiveness,
even with a few things going on at once.  For instance, accessing an
internet BBS using one virtual port while using a remote shell on
another and running basic09 in a third is quite usable.  For short
bursts that fit into the buffer (commands/responses in the os9 shell,
or BBS menus for instance), performance is great.

I anticipate that running a multiline BBS will be fine for at least 3
virtual ports, probably more.  Memory used by the nodes may be more of
a limiting factor. However, a single user downloading a file would
severely impact any others.  Not sure if file download would be
important on a BBS these days anyway.  Other things like games and
messaging would work great.

I may be able to squeeze some more performance out of the driver, but
I don't think it will ever scale to do multiple simultaneous file
transfers very well.  More likely I will prioritize interactive
sessions so that they remain responsive, and let the bulk stuff have
the leftovers.

> a cooling fan will be needed, unlike these power hungry PCs today that bog
> down with the hour glass cursor even when nothing else is going on.  Makes
> ya wonder whether a rack of CoCo 1's can do a better job.  Take'em out of
> their cases, network them all together somehow and make one big CoCo array.
>
> I haven't investigated further into the Telnet features of the Internet
> Modem program that the CoCoNet server is built upon, but I think the CoCo
> can serve and I've seen references to IRC in the code as well.
>
>
>
> --
> ~ Roger Taylor
>
>
>
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