12/28/06
Attaching my IIcx to the rest of the world:
About a week ago, my ethernet card arrived in the mail. I purchased an Apple Ethernet NB card from eBay, which came with the dongle necessary to hook an RJ-45 cable to it. Interestingly, this is one of the cards based on Apple's now defunct Real-Time Operating System Environment, or A/ROSE. It's got a 10MHz 68000 sitting on it, along with 512KB of RAM, expandable to 2.5MB. From a user standpoint, it doesn't change anything about how you use it, but it's an interesting footnote nonetheless. If you'd like to learn more about A/ROSE, there's a good article about it here.
Once the ethernet card was properly installed in its Nubus slot, the next step was installing Apple's Network Software, which I downloaded here. I pulled down version 1.4.5, which is the latest that supports System 6. Running the installer from the disk image automatically detected the ethernet card and installed the appropriate software - easy as that. It dropped an Ethernet extension into the System Folder, as well as a Network control panel. It also updated Appletalk. The Network control panel allows you to tell Appletalk whether you want it to use the Appletalk port or Ethernet instead. So I now had the hardware all set up, and it was time to get TCP/IP installed so I could actually communicate.
Gamba's website pointed me here for MacTCP 2.0.6. Just drop it into your System Folder, reboot, and you're all set. Configuration is a little strange if you're used to configuring TCP/IP on a more modern setup, but the keys are to make sure that 'Ethernet' is selected as opposed to 'Ethertalk', and unless you have a really unique situation, you should be able to specify your gateway and IP address and leave the rest alone. I wasn't able to get it to dynamically get an IP address from my router, so I had to specify a static one instead. No big deal. Fortunately, it had no problem getting DNS information from the gateway I specified.
That was about it! I installed Telnet, Fetch, and Eudora, and all worked great. Here's a screenshot of a Telnet session. Pretty cool! I gave some thought to installing a web browser, but decided against it. I have a hard enough time dealing with browsers on '040 machines, and with today's increasingly complex web sites, I think it'll be pretty futile to browse on the IIcx. If you think I'm wrong, lemme know and I'll I give your suggestion a try.