what is the TandyLink board?

[Mark Anacker]

Hi,
In the latest Radio Shack catalog (pg. 178), there is an entry for
something called the "TandyLink Board Plus". It appears to be a
low-cost LAN interface of some kind. A friend is looking to set up
a small LAN in his house, and would any info on this system. It
appears to be 3Com compatible, which would be real nice. The people
he got on the phone aren't very knowledgable about LANS.

Thanks for the help.

--
Mark Anacker, US West Network Systems Inc., Bellevue, WA
{...uw-beaver!tikal,...!thebes}!toybox!msa -or- msa@toybox
"Their mission read, To Boldly Go,
But how ill-bred, To phrase it so." - Phil Garland

[Jim Gogan]

Simply put, the TandyLink board is an AppleTalk/LocalTalk for PCs.
The equivalent of Apple's LocalTalk connector box is built onto
the card itself. Advantage: you don't have to spend the extra
money for a LocalTalk connector. Disadvantage (big): you then
have to use Apple's cabling system, as opposed to using
Farallon's PhoneNet and RJ-11 connectors/phone cable.
However, inasmuch as the card seems to run just fine with
products such as TOPS, for a small group environment where
(1) you don't have to run a lot of cables & can more or less
daisy chain computers together (2) all you're doing with the
net is primarily moving small/moderate size files between
micros and (3) especially if you've also got Macs, it's not
a bad little network adapter (esp. at the price). Keep
in mind, however, the relatively low bit rate of LocalTalk
(approx. 230,000 bps).
-- Jim Gogan / Univ. of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
--
Jim Gogan MAIL:ugo...@ecsvax.uncecs.edu
Microcomputing Support Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599

[uhc...@trsvax.uucp]

<>
B> In the latest Radio Shack catalog (pg. 178), there is an entry for
B>something called the "TandyLink Board Plus". It appears to be a
B>low-cost LAN interface of some kind. A friend is looking to set up
B>a small LAN in his house, and would any info on this system. It

Tandylink is an "almost" clone of the TOPS "Flashtalk" board, right down to the
strap options. (Biggest difference is that the transformer is on the
board instead of external.) It uses a 8530 SCC and is normally run in SDLC
mode. The communication method is modified RS-485 (multinode RS-422).
This is the near-ultimate "stupid" board. It requires DMA every 10.3 usec,
causing havoc with some floppy operations.

Tandy and Macintosh use shielded twisted pair wiring, while PhoneNET (from
Farallon) uses unshielded twisted pair (phone wire), at a big savings.
In the networks I take care of, I have 800+ ft of unshielded wire
connecting Tandylink adapters, running at 768kbps. With shielded wire,
reduce the length to 500 ft at that speed. "Normal" Appletalk runs
at 230 kbps. Of course, that is the rate of data transfer, while all
of the arbitration timing remains the same and is the bulk of time used,
so it is not three times faster in performance than Appletalk.

Tandy apparently offers a private NETBIOS layer and/or a 3com stack.
I do not think they have a fully transparent bridge between the two,
although there is no reason why you can't buy the software from Tops
or Kinetics, since they do have bridging software. Tandy does not offer
something that will converse with Macintoshes or other "A"-word computers.
Again, Tops and other vendors do.

The "plus" board is a board with a different bus connector so that it
can be plugged into a 1000 EX/HX system. Useless on any other computer.
The "non-plus" board is what fits in a PC. Both require one DMA
channel and one interrupt.

There are lots of trademarks and other reserved-money words here. So,
%s is a registered trademark of %s.

<My opinion, and not that of my employer who really wasn't interested
in my protocol changes to double the performance...>

"Thank you, Uh Clem."
Frank Durda IV @ <trsvax!uhclem>
...decvax!microsoft!trsvax!uhclem
...sys1!hal6000!trsvax!uhclem

[re...@trsvax.uucp]

Regarding Frank's response (uhclem) to this topic, you will no doubt note
that this is a rather tender subject with him.

I would hasten to add that there is an adapter available to allow "plus"
style boards to be used in an ISA (Industry Standard Architecture)
computer. Not recommended highly however, because they inevitably
overlap two slots, and the adapter is rather on the steep side as
far as costs go (in my humble opinion).

John

Opinions herein are mine... all mine... and nothing but mine.