Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!glacier!jbn From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Amiga Networking Message-ID: <17439@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> Date: 11 May 88 18:32:15 GMT References: <8805110808.AA29075@cory.Berkeley.EDU> Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle) Organization: Stanford University Lines: 34 I'm suprised that someone would object to discussing networking on the Amiga, which is certainly a legitimate technical subject. First, hardware is a legitimate problem. There's a tradeoff between bandwidth and cost. RS-232 stands at one of the spectrum, Appletalk in the middle, and Ethernet at the high end, at least in the microcomputer world. Unfortunately, the Amiga lacks built-in support for a network other than the RS-232 ports. So a hardware add-on will be required for any serious networking. Technically, it's not clear that you really want a virtual circuit protocol on a LAN. I spent years working on TCP, both from a theoretical and implementation standpoint. But today I would argue that systems like NFS and TOPS may be more appropriate. On a modern LAN, most transfers are treatable as remote procedure calls or file accesses. The remote-terminal orientation of the ARPANET belongs, to some extent, to the past. Inventing one's own homebrew protocol at this late date is a terrible mistake, though. It's far better to be compatible with something already in existence. This is, after all, a communications problem, and the more things that you can potentially communicate with, the more useful the communications system is. If you want to implement something, I'd suggest NFS over UDP over IP over both RS-232 and some reasonable LAN for which Amiga hardware is available. The protocols are well known and have been implemented by many different people. They are used widely, work adequately, and provide good performance. Public domain implementations for the IBM PC are available. John Nagle protocols are independent of the communications medium. So far Commodore has not, as far as I know, endorsed or supported any of hte