Berkeley TCP socket interface for the Apple IIgs

Scott C. Linnenbringer writes "In case you wanted to do something cool with your fancy little Apple IIgs in the back room, you can use GS/TCP to implement a standard BSD socket interface, allowing you to connect via SLIP, MacIP, and soon PPP on a GNO/ME (GNO Multitasking Environment) UNIX system for the IIgs, now completely abandoned, open-sourced and labeled freeware. GS/TCP also comes with ftp and inetd, built with ORCA/C directly from BSDi sources (hacked, of course,) and a text web browser for GNO/ME can be found at the website."

News Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is news because the date on the picture is February, 1996?

Not the only TCP/IP stack for the IIgs

[The Blue Meanie]

Any reason there's no mention of marinetti [apple2.org] in this article? Marinetti implements a TCP/IP stack for the IIgs, but works under the IIgs' native interface, GS/OS. There's telnet, ftp, AIM, and email apps already, and even the beginnings of a *graphical* web browser for it. And yes, it's open source [sourceforge.net] as well.

Re:Why, you ask?

[Endareth]

I remember Apple IIes from grade school

This article refers to the IIgs which is a completely different beastie. The IIgs was well ahead of it's time, and capable of supporting multiple hard drives, quite decent graphics, and a decent sound system. Used to play some really funky games on my friend's one :-). Think more Amiga than Apple for this one.

A "cheapest and slowest network" contest, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be ripped off if you bought IIgs-es at a dime a dozen. A linksys router is about 1500x faster than the IIgs. So, um, unless you're just really looking to win the "slowest, cheapest network" contest, I'm wondering what practical use this is.

Checked my calendar-- its not Apr. 1 anymore.

GNO's Not Orca

[jsanfroop]

Well, what's this.. looks like someone has stumbled across some 7 year old webpages!

One should note that the GNO/ME distribution does not include GS/TCP. Indeed try Marinetti [apple2.org] if you want to play around with TCP/IP on your GS.

GNO/ME stands for GNO's Not Orca.. named after the Orca shell in which you could use their compiler tools..

Not really worth checking out, unless it brings back that special nostalgia if you're one of the few who actually used this software 10 years ago.

I don't think I saw a link to www.gno.org [gno.org] so there it is, go grab your GNO! You can find download links if you like..

Re:Please don't rely on Slashdot for this info

[Endareth]

However, instead of simply stopping sales of GNO and letting the software wander into oblivion, I am placing GNO into "freeware" status, and I am also making available all source code to the 2.0.4 version to the public and the development community.

If I understand this correctly, the owner of the source code has fully released it to the community, thereby making this 100% freeware, no conditions. As this doesn't appear to be derived from any other flavour of *NIX, I don't think there's anything stopping anyone doing whatever they choose with it.

GNO/ME is a BSD

[usotsuki]

From the
FAQ [mit.edu]:

GNO contains components that originate with a variety of flavors of UNIX. These include 4.3BSD, XINU, and SYSV. It is mostly BSD. As of GNO v2.0.6, GNO has become closer to 4.4BSD. Work is in progress to make it as compliant as possible to POSIX 1003.1 and POSIX 1003.2.

-uso.

Re:How about something like Minix for the IIgs?

[usotsuki]

Minix is BSD-licensed now.

It's theoretically possible. The IIgs's CPU is a 65816, a 16-bit variant of the 65C02. It has 24-bit memory addressing (like the 286). The IIgs came standard with 512K RAM, not too shabby for 1986. If GNO can run on top of GS/OS, I don't see why Minix can't be ported to it.

I suggest someone might want to download KEGS and a 65816 assembler, and maybe the GNO tools and try to bootstrap Minix on it.

Re:Why, you ask?

[usotsuki]

Ah yes. Applesoft BASIC.

More correctly, Apple's adaptation of Miro$oft BASIC-6502. Yeah. From 1977. No wonder it was teh suxor. But it was nice to cut my teeth on, although I would've killed for a C compiler back when I was using the ][...or the IIgs later...

BTW the BASIC on the IIgs doesn't take any advantage of the 65816. *sigh*

-uso.
Want an Apple //e emulator? See my link above!

Re:How about something like Minix for the IIgs?

[bobthemonkey13]

IANAL, but as far as I know, Minix is almost public domain: you can do nearly anything with it (licence here [cs.vu.nl]).

As far as portability, the older version of Minix (1.5) runs on 68k (Amiga, Atari, and Macintosh) and SPARC, as well as x86 (32- and 16- bit). However, the 6502 used in the Apple 1/2/3 series is quite a bit more primitive than even a MMU-less x86 or 68k. In particular, fewer and smaller registers means more swapping to memory, which in turn reduces speed and increases code size. The 16-bit version of the 6502 used in the IIgs would be somewhat better than the 8-bit 6502s in the older Apples, but maybe not by enough. Also, Minix uses a microkernel architecture, which is all very nice from a theoretical standpoint, but causes a severe performance hit on really old hardware.

Is Minix on IIgs possible? Theoretically yes, since it's a Universal Turing Machine*. However, it's unlikely to fit within the extremely limited memory and speed constraints. Crafting a new OS from scratch would probably be much easier. But yes, it would be damn cool.

(*Yes, a UTM is assumed to have infinite storage space, so for theoretical purposes I'm assuming that we can hook a 6502 IIgs up to 512MB SDRAM or something.)

KEGS

[metatruk]

For all you kids at home with nothing to do and no Apple IIgs I recommend this fine emulator available at:
http://kegs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:Acronyms... with slashes

[Anonymous Coward]

The G in Gnome already is for GNU

Re:How about something like Minix for the IIgs?

[Matt Ownby]

I can confirm that the first ][gs's came with 256k of RAM because that's how much our "Woz" had when we got it. I believe sometime later they started shipping all of them with 512k instead.

Man I have so many cool memories of the Apple ][gs!

Re:How about something like Minix for the IIgs?

[ncc74656]

That's the "glass is half empty" viewpoint. The "half full" viewpoint says that the 6502 gives you 256 registers with the special optimized opcodes for fast access to the lowest 8 bits of memory space.

...and the 65816 had the direct-page register, which lets you direct zero-page operations to any 256-byte chunk of the first 64K of memory. For context switching, you could set the direct-page register to a different value for each process and write the processor registers to the same (reserved) bytes in each page.

Apple IIGS was ahead of its time

[Senor Wences]

I recently picked up a IIGS ROM 3 because the computer was so ahead of its time (and so I could play again the games on my old 5.25 inch floppies from my ][+). I continue to be amazed by the IIGS and its operating System GS/OS version 6.0.1.

To give you an example of how ahead of its time this computer was: I am actually netbooting the computer from a Mac Plus running AppleShare File Server 3.0. No disks needed: the IIGS starts up over the network and runs its operating system from the Mac's hard drive. It's certainly not the fastest, but it gives me a 500 MB hard drive for my IIGS.

Information on setting up a netboot network for a IIGS ROM 3 can be found here:

http://www.mandrake.demon.co.uk/Apple/ltalk/iigs _r b.html

Truly geeky stuff.