TCP/IP is required for applications such as FTP, Telnet, and browsers.
It was first implemented on Macs by MacTCP which was available for System 6 and was included as a part of System 7. In the absence of Ethernet, MacTCP uses AppleTalk as the “bearer”. TCP/IP packets are embedded in AppleTalk packets.
My Ethernet carrying SE/30 and a few other machines with Ethernet that i had at one time eg LC III and 660AV simply connect to TCP/IP services via Ethernet. I set up all of these machines to use the Open Transport TCP/IP implementation under System 7.5.5 or later.
My main interest is in the older machines, including the Mac Plus, SE, and SE/30. These machines (except for the one SE/30) only have LocalTalk connections.
The LocalTalk Bridge on the SE/30 (or various other machines with Ethernet) will happily move the AppleTalk packets to the Ethernet, where they are embedded in TCP/IP packets. This means that the original MacTCP packets are embedded in an AppleTalk packet, which is then encapsulated in a TCP/IP packet. They are effectively on a separate virtual TCP/IP network.
To overcome this, a router is required. After a little searching, I found that IPNetRouter is a viable solution. I also found that although it still requires registration, there is a free registration for non-commercial use. You have to go back in time to pick up a promo version:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080328045722/http://www.sustworks.com/site/news_promo.html
The versions cited in the article are for PPC. For 68000 use 1.54 with the same codes.
The router can run on any machine on the Ethernet network. The LocalTalk machines still need to be bridged to Ethernet, but not necessarily on the same machine as the router.
As per the instruction, i have set up a private network, 192.168.0.x behind the router. The MacTCP clients don’t seem to support DHCP, so the IP addresses have been allocated manually, with the router address being 192.168.0.1. The IP address on the Ethernet side is allocated by the network DHCP server.
This is a screenshot from an LC III that was running IPNetRouter but i’ve also run it on the SE/30 and a 660AV.
Example of a localtalk client:
This allows all System 7.5.5 machines to browse the internet using Netscape. The colour classic, running System 7.1 only has 6MB of memory, which is insufficient to support Netscape. It does work if swapping is turned on. I have not succeeded in getting the 6.0.8 machines to run a browser.
All machines support telnet and FTP clients.
I was able to log into an internet BBS and also into my SGI workstation.
I came back to this a year later and had a bit of trouble getting it going again. Fortunately, I had the images above. It seems that the configuration needs to be saved and then reloaded. Perhaps a default file is loaded on startup.
