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This reminds of a quixotic quest I undertook once - implementing enough of a SLIP and TCP/IP stack to send mail with SMTP and retrieve it with POP3, all in PC B
by trollbridge 2y ago
This reminds of a quixotic quest I undertook once - implementing enough of a SLIP and TCP/IP stack to send mail with SMTP and retrieve it with POP3, all in PC BASIC (the kind that still required line numbers).
Amongst other problems, it wouldn't work properly (dropped characters) at anything faster than 9,600 baud, and on an original PC needed to go a bit slower than that; computing things like checksums was exceedingly painful; there wasn't enough RAM (it was limited to 64K for program plus data, which in practical terms meant a PC with at least 96K of RAM); it would have to drop the connection if it shelled out to an external editor. But it did work.
- anthk 2y agoShit I'd love: minimal slip/ppp over serial enough to run a gopher client with a Jupiter ACE and some RAM expansion (16k or 32k). If a Speccy can be connected to the internet with a Gopher client... A small IRC would he half useful too.
- qingcharles 2y agoMight as well go the full insanity.. if you can get it work on the ACE, then surely you can make it work on a ZX81 with a rampak? I remember as a kid in the 80s writing a program in BASIC to get my Spectrum 128 to connect over serial to my Sirius 1 PC so my buddy and I could have a chat application across my bedroom. Wild times.
- anthk 2y agoForth was and it's much faster than Basic sadly.
- pjmlp 2y agoReal BASIC, the one invented at Dartmouth, was compiled to native before execution and relatively fast for the hardware. It was fitting BASIC into 8 bit home computers limited hardware that gave fame to its slowness, given the interpreter approach. By the 16 bit days having access to compilers was already not an issue. It was Turbo BASIC that started my journey as happy Borland customer.
- Zardoz84 2y agoThere was a Twitter client for ZX Spectrum, using Spectranet