On Mon, Feb 08, 1999 at 02:36:49PM -0800, Jonathan Stone wrote:

> Actually, the best-suited hardware of all may be the DECstation 5000
> series (except 200) and the Alpha 3000 series with the ioctl asic.
> The ioasic has a DMA engine that can pump out an entire packet (up to
> 4kbytes, aligned to end-of-page) with only one interrupt.  Same deal
> with reception, tho' the driver may have to poll to find end-of-packet.

So serial on the 5000/2{4,6}0 is actually decent?

> The intersection of people who have the dec hardware, Mac hardware,
> and interest in localtalk maybe empty, tho'.

Reed College used to be such a place.  They were originally a big mac
school, along with a lot of DEC hardware running the actual services.
They gave away all of it a couple years ago.  (I scored a 5000/200 from
the deal, and the {2,3}100s have all found good homes...)

But anyway... the original user wanted to hack localtalk so he could
spew at his laserwriter+ faster than 9600bps.  It seems a moot point
since that printer certainly takes longer to render postscript than it
does to suck it down.  (I used to use one at Reed.)  It's a slow
printer, no matter how fast you can throw the bits at it.

It would still be a cool hack, though it's probably best left to
machines with the actual hardware designed to deal with such a busted
networking implementation.  (IE, macs.)

----
  Aaron J. Grier  | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofy.goof.com
    "NT is mute because it is fundamentally broken, period.  That any 
                 hardware works on that OS is amazing."
     -- Jacob Hawley, Sr. Manager, Custom Engineering, Creative Labs