This page is dedicated to my most ambitious plan: To enable the TI and Geneve to connect to the Internet! This is not a doomed effort, and I'll explain why.
Everyone who tries to work with the Internet notices that the transmission speed is far from being satisfactory. The reason is the enormous growth of the number of connected nodes and the correspondingly rising traffic. The Internet communication is based on the TCP/IP protocol. The designers of the TCP/IP protocol had in mind a very heterogeneous network of computers, based of different operating systems, architectures, and running at different speeds. There are no constraints on the actual transmission speed, and looking at our daily stalls, this was a very wise decision.
Therefore, the computer speed is no reason for not being able to communicate by TCP/IP. Why should it be impossible to provide an implementation for the TI or Geneve? In fact, it's primarily a matter of available memory. Thus, I chose the Geneve with its 512K RAM; anyone who has a TI-99/4A with appropriate expansion is welcome to assist me in porting the software to it.
However, I must admit that time is working against me. The critical point is the network access facility of the Internet Service Provider (ISP) which provides the modem connection. Normally, the connection speed is automatically adjusted to the maximum rate of the client modem, but I also heard that some ISPs limit the minimum rate. I'm afraid that connection rates exceeding 14400 bps cannot be handled reliably by the TI RS232 interface. With slower modems disappearing, it could well be that in the near future only high connection rates are possible.
I put some frequent questions and my answers in a FAQ file.
The code is currently being moved to a repository. As soon as it is available, I will include the link here.
mz, 01-02-1999