Date   : Fri, 12 Nov 2010 10:38:12 +1100
From   : awilliams@... (Alan Williams)
Subject: [OT] No wonder CompSci graduates are unemployed

Phil said:
Acorn certainly did have a working(ish) IP-over-Econet implementation.
Somewhat annoyingly there were two different and incompatible versions
of the wire protocol (corresponding to the DCI2 and DCI4 stacks if I
remember right), and the software was a bit on the buggy side, but it
certainly did exist.  I think I wrote a reimplementation of the DCI2
driver at some point, mostly for the purposes of having something
reliable for my Beeb IP stack to talk to, and I probably still have the
source code lying around somewhere.

Alan said:
That's the EconetA module if I remember correctly.  I have only ever
seen
the DCI2 version of that.  We used it at Acorn Australia to access an
R140
which our email was on.  (Which we got via UUCP over dial up from
Cambridge.)

If there was a DCI4 version, being incompatible with the RISC iX
implementation
would have rendered it near useless.  By the time the DCI4 stack shipped
we had
changed to thin Ethernet.

To my knowledge the implementation is best documented in the RISC iX
doco.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/riscos/docs/Acorn-Unix-Econet-D
evice-Driver-and-Network-Device.pdf

A dci4 version would definitely still have its uses.

Also regarding the Acorn BBC 'C' compiler, it generates byte code.
I didn't know this until I tried to disassemble the code it generated,
thinking it would be 6502, but no.
I suspect this rules it out for any practical purpose.  There is a stand
alone generator, dunno if I would
still have that, I suspect that this just glues on the runtime code.

Alan