Date   : Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:43:47 -0600
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Beeb Networking - Was: No wonder CompSci graduates

Phil Blundell wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 13:10 +0000, samwise wrote:
>> If it ever gets to the point where it's possible to setup a virtual
>> econet over the internet, with a mix of real beebs and emulators, I'd
>> be quite happy to help out and see if we could host some sort of
>> permanent fileserver online.
> 
> Yeah, that was exactly the kind of thing we were hoping to do.
> 
> Since all my Beeb bits are still in storage, maybe I should focus my
> energies on getting it to work under emulation first.  I did sketch out
> a wire protocol at some point which is presumably in my email archives
> somewhere.  I think it probably only needs a couple of hours of
> keyboard-pounding to add the right bits to BeebEm and implement a
> virtual switch daemon, and maybe this would provide a bit of extra
> motivation to finish the work on the real hardware as well.

I wonder if efforts are best concentrated in USB-to-<mumble> devices? For 
anything Internetty (and probably involving emulators) there's going to be a 
reasonably-quick machine with 'net access and USB ports involved. I loathe 
USB, but it is perhaps the logical choice.

<mumble> could be an adapter for any kind of vintage computer networking - 
Econet / Torchnet, RML Znet etc.; why just limit to Econet?

The adapter provides a way of allowing vintage machines to connect to a modern 
network, and also a way for emulated systems to connect to a vintage network. 
Make it cheap and cheerful and dumb, though, and do all the grunt-work in 
software on the modern system.

cheers

Jules