Re: [NTLK] "Upgrading NIE" (the Newton is nearly dead)

On Jun 3, 2006, at 10:45 AM, Paul Guyot wrote:
>> From: Adriano <adriano.angelillis@gmail.com>
>> Apart from that, would you gently spend some minutes of your time
>> to explain a bit more in deep what could be done to upgrade NIE?
> Your plan with NIE is obscure and vague and the most concrete part is
> that you're collecting money (http://u.nie.notwen.com).
> A new NIE is not going to happen.

   Here's an rather off-the-wall idea.. Instead of implementing a
modern TCP/IP stack in the NOS - which I agree would be a huge amount
of work for very little return (IMO), why not put a modern TCP/IP
stack, with SSL and connecting firmware, on a PCMCIA card? Of
course, you'd still have to write the card handler interfaces, but
since most of the processing would be done off-Newton, that should
basically be just data trasnfer between the card and Newton -
although I have no idea about the problems the Newton has with
handling binary communications - that would deal with the endpoint
interface, which I'm not terribly familiar with (and not at all at
the NOS level). A PCMCIA solution would also probably be faster than
on-Newton processing too, and would free Newton processing power to
do other things.

   It would of course require hardware development, which is always
expensive, especially for such a small community - PCMCIA development
could theoretically be done "in the garage" and not a fab, but would
certainly require surface-mount because it's such a thin form factor.

   Another question is - does anyone even MAKE the necessary 16-bit
interface chips required? Or has everything gone CardBus - or might
the CardBus chips have a backward compatible mode for 16-bit?

Jim

-- 
This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries
Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/