Hi all,
I asked this question on the NeXT FB group and got a lot of feedback, but with hindsight, absolutely nobody answered the question I asked! :D
So, I'll be really specific and ask in a different place.
I'd like to design an improved ethernet port that supports 10/100baseT and possibly 1000baseT too. This makes sense because the 10mbit ethernet is a real bottleneck on the NeXT. The backplane can happily support 400 mbits per second.
In trying to do this, my skills are squarely in the hardware area. I'm not a programmer and I'm not able to writer a driver. For this reason, it is smart to look at drivers for more recent ethernet hardware that exist already on OpenSTEP and BSD.
Can you think of an existing driver that would take very minimal porting to get a more modern ethernet chipset working? If so, what chipset is it for?
And, do you know someone who would be willing to do the porting if given working hardware?
Hi,
it's great idea to build new hardware for NeXTs - some people have also started creating new NuBus cards for 68k Macs (see
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?forums/hacks-development.32/ (
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?forums/hacks-development.32/)).
It would be ideal if such a new network card could work with NeXTs as well as Macs (and maybe TI System 1500 Unix servers and Explorer Lisp machines - one can dream...). However, NeXT's NuBus implementation is extended compared to the Mac (and Ti/NuMachine) versions, so this would require more than a mechanical adapter.
You have probably seen the
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/Hardware/NeXTbus-NBIC/NeXTbus_Specification.pdf]NeXT NuBus docs (
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/Hardware/NeXTbus-NBIC/NeXTbus_Specification.pdf) and Apple's "Designing Cards and Drivers" (
https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Designing_Cards_and_Drivers_for_the_Macintosh_Family_2nd_Edition_1990.pdf). I also found the hardware documentation about the LMI Lisp machine (
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/lmi/LMI_Docs/HARDWARE_2.pdf) (which is based on the MIT NuMachine design) useful as introduction on the origins of NuBus.
I would definitely support writing a driver for a card you design and could maybe also make this a project for an interested student of mine.
It's my intent to build a NextBUS card from the ground up containing the chipset. It will likely evolve to gain other features, probably fast wide SCSI and maybe a SCSI to SATA bridge. It seems silly that the machine is throttled to 4 mb/sec SCSI transfers when the bus can easily support 40 mb/sec.
I'm also looking at the idea of putting a "low cost pre-decoded expansion bus" on it, a sort of sub-NeXTBus using smaller sub cards that can fit on the main card, so people can experiment much more cheaply.
I'm open to suggestions.