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[previous article] [next article]The rise in small but powerful personal computers, such as Apple's MacIntosh has led the ECN to consider how best to integrate these machines into our growing network. One method of connecting Macs to the ECN which we are experimenting with is an AppleTalk to ethernet bridge box made by Kinetics, Inc.
As you know, AppleTalk is Apple's computer networking product which runs on simple cable at relatively low speed; approximately 230 KBits/sec. Ethernet, as used here at the ECN between our host machines, runs on coax at roughly 10 MBits/sec. The Kinetics Box bridges these two networks by acting as a host machine on both the AppleTalk and Ethernet networks. It accepts packets on either network which are intended for the other network and forwards them accordingly.
Using the Kinetics Box as a gateway between networks, the ECN hopes to allow Mac users to directly connect to various ECN machines on our local ethernet in the same way you can use ``rlogin'' to connect between various ECN machines today. But the potential uses of the gateway don't stop there. We are also looking at using the Kinetics Box for high speed file transfer between Macs and the ECN as well as using the ECN hosts as Mac ``file servers'' with several people sharing Mac files stored on an ECN machine.
The software to make all of these things possible is still in the early stages of development. However, we hope to have some of it available for testing later this year.
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