SOCKET CODE & alex%nerwin.uucp at umbc3.umbc.edu

[Thad P Floryan]

David Herron asks:

	Over in the amiga groups a guy there (Mat Dillon) is developing some
	networking stuff which uses funky parallel cables as the network
	medium.  The software is fast enough that remote file systems off
	a remote hard disk work faster than a local floppy.

	Since I have an Amiga as well as the Unix PC I'm interested in using
	this network between my two machines.

	... Will the parallel port on the 3b1 do both input and output?  Will
	I need to write a device driver before I can do input & output?
	Anybody else attempting the same?

I, too, have a buncha Amigas flanking my UNIXPCs, and the agony of not being
able to network them except over the serial port at 19.2 KBaud is frustrating.

The Amiga's parallel port (the "printer" (hah) port) is a programmed I-O port
along the lines of what is common among Motorola chips, with a data direction
register whose bits are congruent to the data lines and whose values (0 or 1)
control whether ANY given data line is an input or an output line.  Thus, it is
a true I/O port and very flexible.

The parallel printer port on the UNIXPC is just that, a port for connection to
a parallel printer, and it is essentially uni-directional.  For those of you
with schematics, page 15 documents the parallel interface of the UNIXPC.  The
chip is an 'LS374 whose outputs (directly connected to the parallel connector)
follow the data bus on a rising clock pulse.

I checked this a l-o-n-g time ago (the idea of connecting the Amiga and the
UNIXPC through each's parallel ports), and it won't work.

HOWEVER: with thanks to Lenny for locating the person with all the StarLAN
cards, I ordered some StarLAN cards for my UNIXPCs, and it "should" be possible
to develop a hardware interface for the Amiga's parallel port such that it
can connect to the StarLAN.  Note I said HARDWARE interface.  The area that
will require work will be software.  Perhaps TCP or KA9Q or something similar
can be used.

Because I have a great personal interest in connecting the two types of systems
together, I am interested in hearing from anyone who has information about the
StarLAN interface (either/both hardware and/or software).

Also, any info about Ethernet <=> StarLAN would be appreciated.

Just in case anyone's interested, the Amiga is capable (with either the Dos-
to-Dos or the CrossDOS software) of writing flopppies that can be read on the
UNIXPC (and vice versa).  But using floppies to move material between the two
systems is a pain, and I have a LOT of software to move on a regular basis
because I use the Amiga for all FTP (Internet) file gathering since it has a
lot of disk space (> 1GB (all SCSI)).   Hmmm, anyone ever hear what happened
to Mike Thompson and his SCSI project for the UNIXPC?

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]