[Coco] Ethernet Port Cartridge for the Coco 3

[Frank Swygert]

Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2013 09:44:10 -0800
From: Steve Batson<steve at batsonphotography.com>
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I know I've seen several threads on this in the past with all sorts of opinions on it. While I have a lot of hardware and software experience in the PC world, I'm not  a circuit level person nor do I have experience writing drivers and such to make this type of thing work. I do find it interesting and have some genuine questions.

While some say that the CoCo is too slow to implement an ethernet interface with software to implement the TCP/IP stack on it (and I totally understand that), wouldn't it be possible to create a product that handled all of the Ethernet hardware as well as the networking stack and just transfer requests and responses to the coco when appropriate? For example, if software was doing a file transfer, couldn't the coco just pass the request  off to the controller and transfer the data at speeds that it can handle with the controller doing all of the heavy lifting and buffering as needed?

I know people of talked about a web browser for the coco too. I do think the graphics and resolution limits alone would make that not feasible even if the controller did all the hard work and just passed the page info to the coco, but I don't see why text based connections and file transfer type networking would be out of the question if the controller did all the stuff that the CoCo couldn't do efficiently.

Let's say this was a feasible approach, why would this approach not be acceptable if it works and there's no other feasible way to do it? Better than not having the ability to do it
==================================

Several have mentioned a hardware chip (or small board) that does just that. But for file transfer and such just set up a Drivewire server and do all the Internet stuff on the server then use Drivewire to transfer to the CoCo. That doesn't require any special hardware other than a serial cable.

-- 
Frank Swygert
Editor - American Motors Cars Magazine
www.amc-mag.com