Re: Apple IIe TCP-IP w/ LANceGS Card

[Ethereal <no@spam.com>]

Marsha <menacechgo@aol.com> wrote in
news:Xns9454C4E07F910menacechgoaolcom@206.141.192.32: 

> Designing something to a market of perhaps a few hundered thousand 10-
> year old computers is much more risky than millions of PCI and ISA
> based machines.  These millions of machines generally have the same
> instruction set and plenty of memory for drivers, e.g. a few of the
> files on my PC for it's network card VTDI.386=6K, VTCP.386=59K,
> VDHCP.386=65K, RTL8029.sys=20K.
> This blows any standard //e memory availability if you want to do 
> anything with it.
> Having to design ones own drivers and/or translate coding from x86
> code to 65816 code for a modern network chip, designing the board from
> scratch, etc.  If SSH want's to recoup even a percentage of costs has
> to hope to get it from those few that will say they really need a
> ethernet card.
> And while a good old fashioned hacker would want to get theie Apple II
> on the net, for most of us it's easier to even go out and get an old
> pentium computer to have more connectivity potential than the Apple.

Speaking of bloated OS, drivers, etc.  Check out www.menuetos.org for a 
fine example of the result of efficient programming on x86 platform.  
They've managed to put a graphical OS, https server, mp3s server, DHCP 
server, network card drivers, 3D demos, telnet client, pop client, internet 
chess game and many more on a 1.44MB floppy.  Too bad it hasn't been ported 
to Apple II.