RE: PC<->Lispm Communication

[DUMOULIN@TITAN.KSC.NASA.GOV (Jim Dumoulin)]

If you wish to get your LISPM to communicate with PC's, the best way
is to run TCP/IP on your LISPM and run an FTP server on the PC.  You can
get a public domain TCP/IP that works on most PC ethernet cards by
FTPing to ZAPHOD.NCSA.UIUC.EDU (128.174.20.50).  If you don't have
TCP/IP for your LISPM, there was a product originally developed by
Symbolics but enhanced and marketed by Gold Hill that provided CHAOS
for the PC.  It requires a 3-COM 3c-501 ethernet card in the PC.  Since
there isn't a big demand these days for CHAOS, that product doesn't
get much support for bug fixes.  We tried to use it about 5 years ago
on a major project but we gave up and switched to TCP/IP.   If I
remember right, the file transfer stuff worked pretty good.  It was
just the integration between Gold Hill Lisp and the network code that
had problems.  GC-LISP ran in protected mode on the 80286 and MS-DOS's
drivers including the network drivers ran in REAL mode.  For every
packet on your net, GC-LISP got interrupted and since the 80286 didn't
have a machine instruction to switch back to real mode once in protected
mode, the AT did a software reset of the chip.  This caused us to
loose packets for our application.