Date   : Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:51:28 +0100
From   : robert@... (Rob)
Subject: Master ethernet upgrade

On 13/07/2009, Jonathan Graham Harston <jgh@...> wrote:
>
> How I'd love to be able to do:
>     *TreeCopy net::Docs.$ ftp::mdfsnet at homepages.force9.net:Docs ~C~PR
>

Now that would indeed be very, very, useful.

Certainly I think it makes sense for a *filing system* to be able to
deliver access to *files* through an open command.

PHP, for instance, allows you to open a file "foo.txt" which comes
from the local filing system. or "http://example.com/bar.txt" which
comes from anywhere on t'internet.

This leads onto such things as

CHAIN "http://www.irrelevant.com/menu.bas"

or
*DIR ftp:username:password at ftp.irrelevant.com/pub
SAVE "foo.bar"

> :)

indeed!

Obviously this would need the filing system to understand http, ftp,
etc, which I do not see as being difficult.  And for non-standard
protocols, just OPENUP("raw:host.name:port") would do fine.  With
OSWORD access to raw IP sockets this would be very do-able as a
stand-alone filing system, which then immediately lends itself to
being used with any other implementation of IP on the beeb we may come
up with as long as it supports thesame OSWORD calls... (anybody coded
up PPP yet?)

>
> About 20 years ago I started modifying NFS to pass accesses to
> networks &70-&7F to the serial port. I'll see if I can dig it out,
> as it would be the logical route to patch NFS to pass networks
> &80-&FF to Ethernet, as per AUN specifications.

That would indeed be an excellent starting point, if you still have it.