3 ms·
I deployed probably thousands of NE2000 cards in the early 90s. They were reliable and as the article points out presented much less potential resource conflict
by tssva 6y ago
I deployed probably thousands of NE2000 cards in the early 90s. They were reliable and as the article points out presented much less potential resource conflicts than competing cards. 3COM cards were particularly awful in that regard.
I have a few NE2000 clones running in retro systems I have from that era. I have an actual Novell NE1000 with a 10BASE-T transceiver connected to the AUI port running in an 1984 Zenith Z-160 luggable.
- jandrese 6y agoI remember the 3Com cards struggling a lot with Ethernet autodetection. It wasn't terribly uncommon to get a complaint about a slow network and find that the 3Com plugged into a hub had decided to go full duplex. That said I was generally happy with the 3c509s, once I manually wired down the duplex setting at least.
- fbellag 6y agoOh, I remember having to look at the revision code for the 3c509... If memory serves, if it wasn't one of the red ones it had to be returned, and the red were a mixed bag!
- nikau 6y agoThey might have had the bug we hit back in the day, they sent an interrupt on every IRQ pin regardless of what you set in the config utility.
- Spooky23 6y agoWasn’t the 3c509 the cheap one that offloaded processing to the cpu? One of my first professional IT gigs was helping with a big rollout of HP desktops. We had a lot of problems because of these cards and bay network hub/switches that were mutually incompatible for auto detect. The other fun part of that gig was the VAR upgraded memory on devices, and that generation of HP was very finicky about certain memory specs. Good times in retrospect!