If you decoded the title (and if you really did that instead of reading the permalink, you’re awesome), you’ll know what this post is about, at least generally. (Also, I was going to do binary, but I figured that would be too long).
Throughout computer history, we always needed a way to connect peripherals and stuff to our computers so we can do more stuff. Want to store your data? Connect up a cassette player, floppy drive, optical drive, (floptical drive??), or memory card reader. Want to print out that essay you just wrote? Connect a printer. You get the point, right? The thing is, there are many ways to connect things together.
Generally, there are two approaches towards connecting things to your computer: parallel (sending multiple bits at a time) and serial (sending one bit at a time). Then there are many different capabilities you can add onto that, such as daisy-chaining (think FireWire, or IEC/CBM bus; you connect one thing to your computer, then you connect something else to that thing and both can talk to the computer), multi-master (multiple computers on one bus), multi-slave (multiple peripherals on one bus), plug and play (you can rip the cable out of your computer and it won’t explode), etc.
For the Neutron, I think a daisy-chaining, multi-master, multi-slave serial connection would be useful, as such a connection could be used for multiplayer games and for sharing multiple peripherals between computers. The IEC bus almost fits our needs, with the only problem being that it does not support multiple computers on the same bus. I2C is also close, but still no cigar as it does not support daisy-chaining. So, we’ll have to modify one of them and/or combine them in some way. How to do that is beyond me at the moment.
