Hi Hal,
I've done NTP before, I wanted to do this with GPS since I have never done a GPS implementation before.

Xerox Alto, wow that brings back memories! My dad worked at Xerox in Palo Alto for 20 years in the 70s and 80s. He primarily worked on the D machines but I did get to use an Alto a few times when I was in high school. I learned Mesa sitting in front of one.

That must have been 3Mbit Ethernet right?

I remember going to the lab one Saturday, they were working on a machine that was supposed to have a custom chip, but it was not ready, so they used 7 ASICs, but those were not ready yet either, so they made a large board out of TTL for each ASIC with a ribbon cable into the motherboard, these boards were hung on fishing line from the ceiling so they were just above the motherboard with a very short cable. That thing really looked like something out of a movie.

John S.


On 7/12/2016 1:21 PM, Hal Murray wrote:

t...@patoka.org said:
In addition, even MCU has not enough resources to handle TCP/IP, DHCP  and
NTP, it is some solutions available to outsource it to dedicated  chips. I
was using WIZ5100 (assembled as a modules) with great success.

NTP is pretty simple.  If you are willing to take a few shortcuts, things get 
even simpler.  If you have a NTP server on your LAN, you can skip routing and 
DHCP by broadcasting a request.  It would be interesting to see how small you 
could make a set-the-time package.

The Xerox Alto had an Ethernet boot loader in microcode.  (and space in the 
microcode ROM was tight)  When bringing up a new machine, we figured out that 
it was much simpler and faster to debug the Ethernet before the disk 
controller.  The debugger worked over the Ethernet.  That gave you a solid 
place to stand early in the debugging process.



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