Sabina is a brand-new suite of TCP/IP Internet applications by D. Finnigan, designed especially for the original Macintosh 128K, Mac 512K, and Mac XL (Lisa 2). Yes, it will work on newer Macs too. Sabina uses PPP, the Point-to-Point Protocol, over an RS-232 serial port as its Link Layer.
The Sabina TCP project is the largest software development effort today in the world of classic Macintosh: it is a completely new TCP/IP, as well as a suite of Internet applications.
Sabina TCP will have the following useful applications: Telnet, Email, FTP, and HTTP. I have three applications working now: Telnet, an HTTP web download client (called Neptune), and an email client (Aurora) More applications are planned to follow. Every application will be compatible with a Macintosh 128K from 1984, but will also run on a Power Mac G3 with Mac OS 9.
The Sabina TCP project is a work in progress, begun in April 2020. The following pages outline progress thus far, the applications, and goals for the project in future.
Development on Sabina, which had stalled since the latter half of last year, finally resumes with work on the TCP module, and completing some areas which had been left undone. I began by verifying all the places where the TCP module performs arithmetic on 32-bit sequence numbers, checking that these operations are handled modulo 2^32-1. I found one incorrect branch statement following a comparison of sequence numbers. Next, I completed the Round Trip Time (RTT) estimator using the methods and algorithms in RFCs 6298 and 9293. The RTT estimator still remains to be fully tested and debugged, as does the retransmission mechanism.
Read the Sabina TCP/IP Progress and Development Log for more information and periodic progress reports.
This page last updated: March 1, 2025.