Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!bu-cs!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu!matthews
From: matthews@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Jim Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Communications Toolbox questions
Message-ID: <17984@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 19 Dec 89 17:23:31 GMT
References: <3352@hub.UUCP> <37369@apple.Apple.COM>
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: matthews@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Jim Matthews)
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Lines: 43

In article <37369@apple.Apple.COM> austing@Apple.COM (Glenn L. Austin) writes:
>In article <3352@hub.UUCP> 6500stom@hub.UUCP writes:
>>I agree entirely.  Apple should have written an External Comm Mgr that
>>encompassed all of AppleTalk, serial ports and any other cards that
>>might be installed.
>
>You're missing two points -- (1) external serial ports are supported,
>(2) to support external serial ports for AppleTalk would require a major
>effort from both the serial port manufacturers and the AppleTalk group.
>

No, I think it's the CTB folks who are missing this point.  I don't want
CTB to run AppleTalk (or, more precisely, LocalTalk) off an external
serial port -- I want CTB to let me use my AppleTalk network connection
as a (superior) substitute for a serial line.  My Mac is on a network
with hundreds of thousands of interesting hosts.  This network has
links to Telenet, and thus to commercial services like CompuServe.  It
would be nice if CTB would allow me to use commercial terminal software
(such as White Knight, MicroPhone, CompuServe Navigator, etc.) over
this fast, convenient network connection.  I think that Tim and others
are complaining because CTB isn't sufficiently general -- it is locked
into the world of modems and phone lines, and doesn't deal with other
sorts of stream connections gracefully.

At Dartmouth we've written our own, non-CTB connection tool, the Kiewit
Serial Driver.  It translates calls to the serial drivers into calls on
a network driver, and handles things like option negotiations.  So we
can run White Knight, MicroPhone, and CompuServe Navigator over our net.
Unfortunately, said programs are limited by the assumption that there
are only two serial ports.  We were hoping that CTB would invalidate
that assumption in the minds of application programmers and make our
software unnecessary -- it looks like we were too optimistic.

Jim Matthews
Dartmouth Software Development

Claimer: The KSD is a really neat hack, and is the brainchild of Paul
Merchant and Rich Brown.

Disclaimer: KSD uses the Kiewit Stream Protocol, a locally developed
AppleTalk stream protocol, so it won't be as useful on other nets.
We also run a gateway that translates KSP to TCP/Telnet, and that's how
we hook up with the rest of the world.