Why did you buy such a card in the 90s? Of course you wanted to play Doom or Duke3D with your buddies!
And to share the broadband cable internet with the neighbors across the street!
The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]
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Re: The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]
#22Half the Internet was running on these in the mid-90s. Every Linux and BSD PC had one stuffed in it.
And now their ghosts continue to live and serve in virtual machines like QEMU.
Re: The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]
#23I quite like these in-depth videos on the history of a particular card... would be nice to see one on the Intel PRO/100 next. If you like this kind of thing I also highly recommend this 43 minute history of Creative and the Sound Blaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPa6wRECw0
The Intel PRO/100 NICs using the 82557, 82558, and 82559 controllers were a joy to work with on Windows. The NICs performed well and there was some backwards compatibility in the drivers. I have a vague memory of a lockup bug in some Linux driver versions that would knock machines off the network but it was eventually fixed. I really enjoyed Intel's foray into networking in the late 90s. Their Ethernet hubs and switc…
> I really enjoyed Intel's foray into networking in the late 90s. Their Ethernet hubs and switches were economical and reliable. It really made no sense for them to be in that market, and they ultimately ditched it, but I liked the simple and inexpensive gear.
Intel was always looking for new markets to enter. It's definitely not unreasonable to build NICs and things for NICs to talk to.
Re: The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]
#24Half the Internet was running on these in the mid-90s. Every Linux and BSD PC had one stuffed in it.
And then somewhat later, when things moved to 100Mbps, the 3c905b and 3c905c-tx
I still have a box with about a dozen of those around here somewhere; They were still useful even well into the era of on-motherboard ethernet because installing the operating system over the LAN was a lot less of a hassle than swapping CDs around and finding out that the drive or the media went flaky etc. Network boot support for the on-motherboard devices was frequently crap or just plain missing, but the 3c905 could slot a proper boot ROM. The last revs of the board even came with said boot ROM right from the factory.
I have a vague memory that there was one particular revision that had some kind of flaw which made it undesirable; It would drop DMAs or interrupts or something like that. The A revision maybe? I'll probably remember at some particularly annoying time.
Re: The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]
#25Re: The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]
#26Ah, the glory days of finding interrupts, network cards that literally caught on fire, hunting down that one screamer that took down the whole LAN. I don't know why we glorify nostalgia, it was cool at the time but not great. Especially horrible was the Novell 'priesthood' who refused to share any information for fear of giving up power.