This little device was perfect back in the days of Novell Netware servers running IPX. To install windows 95 or NT4 was a godawful number of disks. If you did

This little device was perfect back in the days of Novell Netware servers running IPX. To install windows 95 or NT4 was a godawful number of disks. If you did have those, you also had to have the proper NIC drivers on hand as well to get it connected, and there were many different NIC's in our lot - far too many to carry drivers with you. And no USB and zip disks were far too faulty to rely on. To add the Novell IPX protocol stack - it was a 6 floppy disk endeavor. Disk drives were slow - very slow... It would take hours to complete, and often the disks would not properly read. I think it was an anti-piracy measure - the Novell installer would fail at the final disk of 6, and it would not find a particular file - the Novell installer floppies were over-provisioned so they were larger than regular floppies. This would make it impossible to copy. But - using one of these Xircom adapters, with 3 disks we could boot DOS, install Xircom drivers, add TCP/IP and SMB, mount and format the local hard drive, and finally copy the Windows installer files and all possible drivers at once to the local drive. Run setup.exe; in half an hour you had a complete workstation on the network.