MoofTCP – A modern replacement for MacTCP on 68k Macs

Author here. Setting aside the effort and cost involved in refurbishing the Mac itself, I can assure you this was not a one-prompt project. It required some planning and steering to build something friendly without scope creep. Despite (or because of) the non determinism, there is still an art and science to engineering by prompt. Just as C and so forth were shortcuts to allow creativity without learning machine language and having to painstakingly manage a memory heap, LLM tools further allow us to manifest creativity.

Best description I heard is that LLMs are like “eyeglasses for the mind.” It levels the playing field for people like me who maybe don’t have time to learn classic Mac C, the retro68k dev environment, how the hell TCP/IP works at a low level, and all that. Maybe in the same way that professionally it’s allowing me to contribute to areas of the codebase that i couldn’t before and vice versa with my colleagues who used to rely on my area of expertise.

While I was certainly proud that I had some slightly unique or scarcer talent before, I don’t feel a need to be a gatekeeper about it in the new world (and I’m not suggesting you are), since I’m able to deliver a ton more value at a higher velocity now. That follows thru to personal projects like this, where I can finally do this kind of project and see results without losing too much of my precious free/family time.

I agree completely. Personally, I think the art of programming was lost the moment we started using human-readable languages.

Some people see coding as simply getting a problem solved, and aren't interested in how the CPU actually does it. Others appreciate the craft of painstakingly arranging machine instructions, understanding every register and every clock cycle, and knowing they're solving problems that not just anyone can.

For us, that's where the sense of worth and accomplishment comes from. Using a high-level language to have a compiler do all the interesting work rather misses the point.

But I don't fault people who use Python, C++, or even assembly. It's just a different way of looking at it.

I can say as the author, aside from subjectively better feel, the DHCP support and the pretty easy install are nice wins over MacTCP too. And just not relying on something that hasn't been supported for 30-odd years.

I mean I guess but the readme made it sound like this would be a night and day difference. A lot of bashing of the original.

Interesting, I was considering trying to make an Ansible provider/plugin/whatever for System 6/7. Might reduce the back-and-forth with things like Infinite Mac on initial setup.