[Coco] Ethernet Port Cartridge for the Coco 3

[Steven Hirsch]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2013, John W. Linville wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 09:44:10AM -0800, Steve Batson wrote:
>
>> While some say that the CoCo is too slow to implement an ethernet
>> interface with software to implement the TCP/IP stack on it (and I
>> totally understand that), wouldn't it be possible to create a product
>> that handled all of the Ethernet hardware as well as the networking
>> stack and just transfer requests and responses to the coco when
>> appropriate? For example, if software was doing a file transfer,
>> couldn't the coco just pass the request  off to the controller and
>> transfer the data at speeds that it can handle with the controller
>> doing all of the heavy lifting and buffering as needed?
>
> I will say categorically that there is _nothing_ preventing a CoCo from
> being able to communicate via TCP/IP.  This is true either over serial
> or via ethernet (provided the correct hardware), and also true whether
> the networking code runs on the CoCo itself, on a wiznet or similar
> device, or on a connected host (e.g. DriveWire).  At least one option
> (serial port to DriveWire server) exists today already.  Running the
> stack on the CoCo itself is really just a Simple Matter Of Programming.

A full TCP/IP stack called Marinetti was written for the Apple IIgs.  No 
web browser, but there are native telnet, ftp and e-mail clients. 
Hardware is a simple "kinda dumb" interface card called Uthernet.  I think 
it's basically a 10Base-T to serial conversion, but the stack is all on 
the host processor.

There's also a 6502 network environment called Contiki.  I always thought 
that might be a good candidate for porting to the CoCo.  Contiki is 
available for Commodore 64, Apple 2 and a few other machines.

Steve


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