[Coco] CoCo Ethernet for $25-$30...

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 11:59 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Apr 8, 2013, at 12:45 PM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> I have ben waiting over a decade for someone to come out with some way to get a CoCo on the internet without it just being a PC on the internet with a CoCo attached... Still hasn't happened, so I guess one of us will do it then figure out a way to standardize the interface so software can be written.
>>
>> I don't think this assessment is fair.  The web server, telnet client,
>> inetd, smtp client, etc that work with DriveWire 4 all process their
>> respective protocols at the TCP layer.
>
> Yes, true, and I understand. But it's just a PC doing something and then the CoCo is basically downloading it. If someone hooked up a PC to the CoCo so it could print via parallel, it wouldn't feel the same to me as a CoCo parallel port adapter. If "let me show you what I can do on my computer" involves another computer, I'm just not sure it's quite the same.

No, this is incorrect... I guess I have not been explaining it correctly.

The PC in DW4 does *nothing* more than a Wiznet chip does, in fact it
does much less than a wiznet chip can do.  The wiznet chip supports
plain TCP sockets, which is what DW4 provides, but the wiznet chip
also can provide application layer things like FTP or HTTP download.
DriveWire does *not* provide application layer services, only raw TCP.

Consider DriveWire 4's networking just a (more limited) wiznet
emulator.  Essentially this is what it is, nothing more.  The PC is
not doing any "heavy lifting" or anything like that.