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Comment by Neywiny | Hacker News Reader

Without seeing the memory saving metric and error bars, these are marginal improvements. Kudos on making a thing but I'm not seeing it. I also don't have a 68k mac though so maybe I don't see this being a big deal.

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Is not a marginal improvement an improvement worth having?

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.

Yeah, I'd personally be happy about a new implementation even if it didn't really improve anything, just because I think there's value in having an actively-developed version.

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.

? The only reference I see is

> MacTCP is wonderful, but it is old, and on a 4 MB Mac Classic with a SCSI Wi-Fi/Ethernet adapter like BlueSCSI it can be slow to answer, hungry for memory, and awkward to set up.

Which... I don't own a Mac Classic, so I can't speak it its factual accuracy, but that doesn't sound like bashing.

I'll bash it: MacTCP is awful. The first several versions of Open Transport with System 7.5.x were somehow even worse. And MacPPP was an abomination.

I like to show people Hunter Cressall's parody of the Switchers ad campaign to remind/educate them that the Macs of yore were no panacea. It's hilarious and spot-on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEvYETWVK6M

Source: I accidentally became the other Mac guy at an ISP in-era (1995?).

I'm not sure that anybody would expect a niche hobby project for rare 40 year old hardware to be "a big deal." Hope you're working on something fun and low-stakes too!

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