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