Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Berkeley TCP socket interface for the Apple IIgs

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the dusting-it-off dept.

Scott C. Linnenbringer writes "In case you wanted to do something cool with your fancy little Apple IIgs in the back room, you can use GS/TCP to implement a standard BSD socket interface, allowing you to connect via SLIP, MacIP, and soon PPP on a GNO/ME (GNO Multitasking Environment) UNIX system for the IIgs, now completely abandoned, open-sourced and labeled freeware. GS/TCP also comes with ftp and inetd, built with ORCA/C directly from BSDi sources (hacked, of course,) and a text web browser for GNO/ME can be found at the website."

2 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. how wonderfully useless by SuperBanana · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    This is both interesting and a terrible shame. It's interesting, because the people involved obviously have some talent. It's a shame, because they're devoting such talent to utterly useless projects.

    There's NOTHING you couldn't do better, easier, cheaper, for less power/heat, in a smaller package, and faster(all by dozens of orders of magnitude)...with something more modern.

    Even the 8-bit uC sitting on my desk right now runs at 50mhz, fully supports C or an easy to learn assembly language- it's got seperate data+IO busses, 5-6 serial ports(SPI, IrDA, RS232, RS485 are all supported), dozens of IO lines for bitwise or parallel IO...builtin ethernet with a VERY thorough royalty-free TCP/IP stack w/large set of utility routines, two forms of realtime operations(one is the uCOSII). Oh yes, and it costs about $50 in single-unit quantities including ethenet magnetics etc...with very aggressive quantity pricing. Oh, and it's based off the Z80 family, so if you know the Z80, you'll find this baby pretty familiar(if you hadn't guessed already, this is the Rabbit3000 core module.)

    ...and it's just ONE of hundreds of uC's available.

    --
    Please help metamoderate.
  2. Just How Slow by Effugas · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I don't think people grasp just how slow the Apple IIgs was.

    I, of course, didn't. Middle school for me was defined by the l'il bugger, minus about six months of its power supply choking if I did something excessive like use the floppy drive (800K, and _no_ hard drive).

    I have fond memories of flaming people for using ZIP when an obviously superior format, SHK(Shrinkit), was common for the IIgs.

    Yeah -- my 2.2mhz speedster had a better algorithm than a PC *giggles*. Right.

    Seriously, though -- graphical web browser? For IIgs? GIFS TOOK AN HOUR APIECE TO RENDER, line by godforsaken line...

    That being said, did that machine have a bad ass sound synth or what...took like five years for PCs to even come close with the GUS, and a while longer before SB Live became common enough to surpass the synth capabilities of the trusty IIgs...

    80's music? You mean MODs?

    Oh yeah, ProTERM made for a great Unix dumb terminal...

    --Dan
    www.doxpara.com