Re: Appletalk or GS/TCP?

[shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford)]

In article <5aovub$2cu$1@scramble.lm.com>,
Matt Portune <mportune@telerama.lm.com> wrote:
>In article <5akr4a$kgp$1@europa.frii.com>, shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford) wrote:
>>Egad, a bit pricey there. I sure am liking my $75 secondhand Fastpath.
>
>Randy, what exactly is the Fastpath?  Will it eliminate the need for a mac to 
>bridge my GS and PC via Appletalk?  Is it an older piece of hardware, or can 
>it still be found?  Thanks!

It's basically an ethernet<->localtalk bridge, and can route stuff other than
Appletalk as well. It'll do TCP, says the manual. I got it and use it just for
routing Appletalk between my ethernet Macs and my IIs, Macs, and printers on
localtalk. It has 10base2 for the ethernet side, and an old style DB9 localtalk
port. It was made by Kinetics but Shiva supports 'em now. I'd check with them
about availability.

I have a Fastpath 4, which I presume is older than the 5R that one guy was
wanting to get $200ish for last time he posted in marketplace. There are other
makers of such devices, such as Dayna and Asante. They typically handle either
two or eight localtalk devices, cost $200+, and may do only Appletalk. The
guy who sold me the Fastpath said it can do 250 localtalk devices. The manual
says localtalk supports 32 devices per network segment, which is a more 
reasonable limit I'd say. You need bridges to get more. Lo and behold, the 
manual mentions the IIgs even.
-- 
Randy Shackelford                                 
shack@frii.com