Tuesday, November 24, 2009

When 1993 technology goes online

It was a very exciting and frustrating night for me. I had spent a good portion of the evening trying to decipher very old information from the Internet to get my Amiga 1200 networked. (more after the click)



So I had the right hardware: A 3COM Etherlink III PCMCIA adapter card that I got off ebay for 99 cents. This is one of the older cards that has the RJ45 dongle. It supports a blazingly fast 10Mbps connection although I doubt the 68060 can push the data that fast. I also have an 802.11b wireless card but unfortunately it lacks the appropriate support for WPA encryption. So I didn't want to open my home network up to hacking just for the Amiga's sake. So it was wired we go.

So apparently TCP/IP has been part of the Amiga OS's vocabulary since around 1992 or so. Commodore actually produced their own Zorro Bus (a bus similar to PCI) ethernet card back then for the big box Amigas (2000, etc). I found reference to several TCP/IP stacks such as AmiTCP, Miami and Genesis. The problem was finding the newest, more support version. Supposedly a version of AmiTCP shipped with the last official 68k OS3.9. I pulled out my official AmigaOS3.9 CD and attempted to hunt down the install files for this. I did indeed find it on the CD but no install or documentation. So this is when I started to go down a long path of old information. I had to use the wayback machine in order to scrounge up documents. The one thing the Amiga really lacks is a up-to-date FAQ. You will find a mismatch of old information from the mid to late nineties (usually 404'd these days). It was truly frustrating and I quickly realized how the Internet is getting so big and links go bad very quickly. Now granted we are talking about 10+ years that some of these people decided to let their personal pages go bye bye. If it weren't for the wayback machine's archive, I would have never figured this out without help from others.

So yes, I started down that path of installing different versions of TCP/IP stacks and nothing worked. The Amiga OS is a little confusing. There's DEVS: and LIBS: and ENVS: and binaries (C:) and startup sequences (S:) that all need to be configured. When things go right, you simply click on an installer icon and it guides you through the setup. I went through this with several older versions of Amitcp, genesis and the miami stacks but had little luck. Finally it came down to a guy who happened to make an emergency single-disk version of a network-boot-disk. It was relatively new (within a few years) so I downloaded it, unarchived it, and wrote the ADF (Amiga Disk Format) file to a blank disk. By the way, I have hundreds of 3.5" 880kb disks and only about 10% still work. I throw away a lot of bad 3.5" disks these days. I booted up the disk and it configured itself along with asking me some basic TCP/IP questions and it worked! I was actually able to ping other machines on my network and even use a samba utility to map to a windows share! The Amiga was on the network!

Next time I will share with you how I got FTP, and a real web browser up and running! As a bonus I had a look-a-like winamp player playing MP3s that I had just downloaded from a friend's FTP site! All good stuff and very amazing for a machine from 1993!

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