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Yep certainly do. The cards and software were written for Sage by a company called Alfa Systems formed out of the remains of Sinclair (David Karlin who designed
by peteri 10y ago
Yep certainly do. The cards and software were written for Sage by a company called Alfa Systems formed out of the remains of Sinclair (David Karlin who designed the QL, Rupert Goodwins who wrote bits of Spectrum ROM and few others) with an ex-Amstrad employee called Vik Olliver who now works doing various things with 3D printers in New Zealand.
The product was called MainLan and I started working for Alfa working on an integrated Ethernet chip called Enzo (mentioned in Byte April 1990) which needed very few extra components (chip nearly worked first time apart from an address decoding bug which was fixable with a PAL, I think from memory the PS/2 MCA version was correct)
Dunno how many Sage sold but we did a few revisions eventually making a 10BASET version and a parallel port one.
At the time it could send packets faster than some 8390 based cards could receive crashing the receiver (I suspect it was DMA timing problem)
When we developed the Novell IPX driver for the card the driver software was uploaded to the Novell test site via a 2400bps modem with a IPX packet driver so we just copied the files to a file share on a box in Utah from London.
At the time the biggest problem was the lack of documentation on how the MSDOS network redirector worked which meant we had to roll our own, we also found that Norton commander used some really obscure FCB calls to change directories rather than dos 2 and later handle based calls.
Brings back many memories of being a young 20 year old.
- teh_klev 10y ago"MainLan" - thank you! I'd been racking my memory cells for the name of the product. In the original mid-80's product with the DE-9 connectors, was it RS-423 that was used, or something proprietary? I too was 19-20 years old circa '86-'87 :)
- peteri 10y agoThe DE-9 version was before my time (in development terms) I think it used RS485 and a Z8530 but the 4Mbps speed feels a bit quick for those technologies. I can still remember the prefix 00802C which we used for Ethernet addresses and at one point I ended up decoding Ethernet packets from an oscilloscope to make sure we were getting the CRC calculation correct. There are a few ways to compute a CRC and some books incorrectly say that starting the shift register with all ones is the same as inverting the first 32 bits into the register, I suspect this is because the error detection effect is the same. Somewhere I probably have a card or two and I might have the schematics lurking around but they'll be in the basement somewhere.