11 Facts About Econet

Econet was Acorn Computers's low-cost local area network system, intended for use by schools and small businesses.

Econet software was later mostly superseded by Acorn Universal Networking, though some suppliers were still offering bridging kits to interconnect old and new networks.

Acorn's Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry agreed to allow it to be offered with Econet fitted, as they had previously done with the disc interface.

Econet was officially released for the BBC Micro in the UK in 1984, and it later became popular as a networking system for the Acorn Archimedes.

Econet was eventually officially supported on all post-Atom Acorn machines, apart from the Electron, along with 3rd party ISA cards for the IBM PC.

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Econet was supported by Acorn MOS, RISC OS, RISC iX, FreeBSD and Linux operating systems.

Econet was supported by a large number of different computer and server systems, produced both by Acorn and by other companies.

Econet API includes an Econet_MachinePeek command, which can be used by software to determine if a machine is present on the network and its hardware platform.

On later 32-bit machines, the Econet connection was made via five of the pins on their 15-pin D-type Network port, which could accept MAUs to allow other types of network to be connected via the same socket.

Econet used a connectionless transmission model, similar to UDP, with no checksumming or error correction at this layer.

At the time and in the markets for which Econet was developed, the main purpose of computer networking was to provide local area shared access to expensive hardware such as disc storage and printers.