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Comment by tr352 | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting as I’m trying to connect a Macintosh SE/30 that I recently brought back to life, without having to shell out crazy money for a network card on eBay. I wonder whether this TCP/IP over PPP solution also works under A/UX, which is what I want to run.

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Could the SE/30 run A/UX?! Wow!

Yes, it's the only compact Macintosh that does.

Oh, how I wish I still had my SE/30. Looking back through rose-tinted glasses, still the machine I had the most fun using. (Partly because of the machine, partly because everything I did on a computer back then was fun.)

Anyway, good luck!

I remember the SE/30 had an expansion slot that could have a video card to power an external monitor. I wonder if such boards survived and could be resurrected.

Does A/UX have a PPP driver ?

You could run NetBSD on your SE/30, it will do PPP (and IPv6).

Pretty sure from my college days it has a full tcp stack, certainly I remember running X11R3 on A/UX and using two machines to get decent performance (one as server, one as client)

I used to have my RS-6000 (connected to my Intergraph monitor and a proper Model-M keyboard) running as X client to my laptop, which had a much smaller screen, and work that way. I could run a browser on the laptop (Firefox doesn't like X too much) and have a couple terminals and Emacs on glorious AIX flavored CDE.

Delved into this a bit, and found some claims that there's no PPP driver for A/UX, so I guess there's the answer. I know about NetBSD. However, in my somewhat irrational mind, it lacks the cool factor of A/UX, the spiritual stepfather of Mac OS X (the biological one being NeXTStep, obviously).

The PPP protocol isn't very complicated, how easy it would be to add to a binary-only UNIX is another question. You could have a look for whether the A/UX network stack is from BSD or System V. One thing that would make a big difference is whether it supports STREAMS [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STREAMS

A few minutes of googling make it look like SLIP and PPP solutions exist for A/UX.

There are no PPP solutions for A/UX. I also have a SE/30 with 6.x, 7.1.1, 7.5, and A/UX on it (8 GB is a LOT of hard drive space on a SE/30) and the PPP solution works for everything except A/UX.

What about SLIP?

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