gnu (02/01/83)
The PCNet software for Pets was pretty horrible. We couldn't implement the real protocol because Pets could not receive characters one-at-a-time at 300 baud in a Basic program, without dropping chars. It worked OK at 110 but we never pursued that angle. We were looking at ways to do the low level in Assembler -- I wrote the whole protocol in 6502 Assembler for the Apple -- but there was no known way to get at the incoming characters from the modem (over the wonderful HP-IB interface Pet ran their slow disks and expensive modems over). On the Apple the Micromodem II documentation was very clear about assembler language access. My overall impression was that the Pet was not worth considering. A machine badly straightjacketed by being born to a company that didn't understand software. I don't know if the 64 is any better but if it's Pet-compatible it doesn't sound promising. John Gilmore, ex-PCNet Project