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1.70 Mhz 8-Bit Ataris Get 10 Mbit Ethernet

Posted by simoniker on from the next-up-firewire dept.

point writes "Thanks to Chris Martin, 8-bit Atari power users can now enjoy 10 Mbit Ethernet, something that the Commodore 64 crowd have been able to do for over a year now... Time to pick up that age-old flamewar? An Ethernet-enabled Atari port of the Contiki operating system has already been completed, and brings the Atari users telnet, e-mail, a web server and a web browser. Pictures and schematics for the Ethernet card, as well as screenshots of the system in action on an Atari 800 are available from the project's webpage."

7 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. I'm Sorry, but ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Why?

    I mean? Why not just emulate it on a decent pc?

    I suppose this is one thing I will never get used to.

    Posting anon in case I actually get first post, and I don't wanna get modded down just for that.

  2. It's called a HOBBY by Pizaz · · Score: 5, Insightful
    some people build scale replica plastic models, and others like to do new things with old hardware.

    To each his own...

    -PizaZ

  3. Re:oh please tell me why by 00420 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There is no way that you can tell me everything you do for fun is USEFULL to the world.

    --
    Have you tried Linux yet?
  4. Re:Jeez! by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2, Insightful
    How fast were the early pdp's that ran BSD Unix 4.2 that included TCP/IP? My guess is a maybe a little faster with alot more memory but not much.

    These boxes were used as routers before Cisco came to be during the early internet. They could handle pings quite well I assume.

    Remember to this day the TCP/IP stack of BSD is still used because it had to be so efficient back then..

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  5. Why? by LittleBigScript · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A lot of people like to ask "WHY?" when it comes to technology. But these little gizmos, which still work amazingly, answer a different question, "Why not?" Why not play with the old stuff?

  6. Re:Jeez! by AndroidCat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Indeed. Starting from scratch with a minimum system is a good way to learn TCP/IP inside-out. Anyone can push data with a hot processor and a fat pipe, the trick is to do it without those.

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  7. Re:Jeez! by fitten · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, the major cause of code bloat and slow apps is that fast processors have allowed people to just ignore or write off being efficient and/or go ahead and add all those other features into the app because they have plenty of room and processing power to deal with it or... to just be sloppy. Back in the day, you had to distill your designs to include the most important stuff and chop out the fat because you didn't have the space or processing power to do some things. Try fitting a word processor that handled fonts, underline, bold, etc. in 64KB of memory. Today's word processors can't even fit in less than 1MB.

    I've always been amused when folks from "normal" CS came to work in our embedded labs. "You want me to do *what*? and I only have 1MB of space?" Heh... people just don't realize what you can do in even 1KB of space.