The Kinetics FastPath was a
LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge (now referred to as a router) created in 1985 to allow
Apple Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
computers (which at the time only had
LocalTalk
LocalTalk is a particular implementation of the physical layer of the AppleTalk networking system from Apple Computer.
LocalTalk specifies a system of shielded twisted pair cabling, plugged into self-terminating transceivers, running at a rate ...
network connections) to communicate with other computers on
Ethernet
Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...
networks. The product had five significant revisions (known as KFPS-1 through KFPS-5) during its lifetime and was ultimately sold to Shiva Networks late in its existence. The original FastPath was developed to extend AppleTalk on Ethernet for
Apple Computer, but from the beginning it was also modeled after an implementation of the Stanford Ethernet - AppleTalk Gateway (SEAGATE) created at
Stanford University Medical Center by Bill Croft in 1984 and 1985.
Bill Croft declares in net.micro.mac that Kinetics are using a modified version of the SEAGATE code
/ref> SEAGATE was a combination of hardware and software that picked up IP packets from the Ethernet network and encapsulated them inside of DDP packets on the AppleTalk network and conversely picked up specially-encoded DDP packets on the AppleTalk network and placed them on the Ethernet network as IP packets.
Although a few sites used the original SEAGATE multibus hardware as defined, it served as a proof-of-concept and was eclipsed by the Kinetics FastPath and similar hardware gateways by other companies. However, many university and research FastPath owners continued to be able to run the Stanford gateway software (later called MacIP) inside the Kinetics FastPath. This is because KIP was an open source interface to the Kinetics hardware and local modifications and adaptations could be made.
By 1987, Apple had begun shipping Macintosh computers that were capable of having Ethernet connections directly, but the LocalTalk networking products prospered into the early 1990s, due to the popularity of Apple's plug-and-play networking and the continued existence of popular LocalTalk devices such as the LaserWriter.
See also
* GatorBox
* LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge
* MacIP
References
External links
Information about the Shiva FastPath 5
Networking hardware
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