[ih] Hello, Internet History group

[David Finnigan]

Indeed, PPP came a little later. I chose to implement PPP for practical 
reasons: it seemed to be more robust and interoperable than SLIP. But 
yikes! What an over-engineered protocol. Writing and debugging PPP was 
one of my least favorite parts of this project.

-David Finnigan


On 10 Mar 2025 4:20 pm, touch at strayalpha.com wrote:
> FWIW, those Macs did have TCP/IP - using SLIP. I think PPP came much
> later. But I do recall using it with Fetch (1989)
> 
> Lots of us also used terminal emulators too, including Kermit - which
> a friend of mine was porting to the Lisa in summer 1984. That didn’t
> extend IP into the Mac, though, but could be used to put about 16
> different terminal windows on a single Mac (helpful for remote job
> management on a bunch of Sun workstations that were 1 mile and 10”
> of snow away at Cornell).
> 
> Joe
> 
>> On Mar 10, 2025, at 1:59 PM, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history
>> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>> By-the-way, the folks from Intercon, who did a commercial TCP/IP
>> product for the Mac back in the 1980s, are still around even if the
>> company is not.
>> 
>> I think Craig Watkins would know more - I suspect he is still at
>> crw at transcend.com
>> 
>> --karl--
>> 
>> On 3/10/25 1:09 PM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
>> 
>>> You might also want to reach out to Jim Mathis.  I think he
>>> implemented the first TCP/IP for Apple.  I don't think he is on
>>> this mailing list. I am not sure if I still have his current email
>>> address but let me know if you can't find a way to reach him.
>>> barbara
>>> On Monday, March 10, 2025 at 09:27:26 AM PDT, David Finnigan
>>> via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>> Hello everyone,
>>> 
>>> I just joined the Internet history group today. A brief
>>> introduction:
>>> Since April 2020 I have been working on implementing the Internet
>>> protocols on the earliest models of Apple Macintosh: the Mac 128K
>>> and
>>> Mac 512K from 1984. The goal is to implement the original triad of
>>> Internetworking applications: electronic mail, FTP, and Telnet on
>>> the
>>> first models of Macintosh. I am using PPP over the serial port as
>>> the
>>> link layer.
>>> 
>>> I enjoy programming in 68000 assembly language, and I also know
>>> 6502 for
>>> the Apple II. I first started programming Apple computers around
>>> 1999,
>>> and vintage computing is today one of my hobbies.
>>> 
>>> While implementing TCP on the early Macintosh, I have a few
>>> questions
>>> which are mostly on the philosophy of design, evolution, and
>>> rationale
>>> behind some features or design decisions in TCP/IP, and I'll dole
>>> these
>>> out in the coming days or weeks.
>>> 
>>> -David Finnigan
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