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Reminds me of how excited I was to get a USB Ethernet port for my Packard Bell 1st gen pentium 60mhz that was discounted because it had the floating point bug.

Reminds me of how excited I was to get a USB Ethernet port for my Packard Bell 1st gen pentium 60mhz that was discounted because it had the floating point bug. But yeah it just didn't work due to failing drivers and that is when I realized that the future promised by these plug and play protocols was going to be fraught by the same hardware compatibility challenges that make building systems hard. I also have a motherboard currently where the usb-c port only works at USB 2.0 speeds in both Linux and Windows. I get the feeling that it is probably just broken for everyone who had this model and support didn't have much to say either. This stuff is hard and one can hope that it eventually gets figured out but I suspect not.

toast0 5y ago
What was a 60 mhz Pentium system doing with a USB port? It certainly didn't come with one, as by the time USB was released in mid 1996 the FDIV pentiums had been recalled for a year and a half (December 1994). USB support on Windows didn't really get acceptable until windows 98 and even then it wasn't good, so I'm not surprised the USB Ethernet device didn't work out.
- simtel20 5y ago
  It sounds like a card was purchased and installed in the PC.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Yeah, USB + Ethernet [+ Firewire] all-in-one cards used to be reasonably common, because many motherboards in the PII-PIII time didn't have USB or only had two USB ports, and a lot also did not have an on-board Ethernet port.
  - robotbikes 5y ago
    I could be wrong considering it was over 2 decades ago and I never verified the floating point bug. There were no expansion ports on the computer and so I was using one of the built-in USB ports as that was the only expansion possible. This seems like the motherboard it would have used https://pb.retropc.se/770.html https://pb.retropc.se/770.html But yeah windows 95 did have very limited USB support based upon the 2nd service pack if I remember correctly but it did not really work very well.

toast0 5y ago

What was a 60 mhz Pentium system doing with a USB port? It certainly didn't come with one, as by the time USB was released in mid 1996 the FDIV pentiums had been recalled for a year and a half (December 1994). USB support on Windows didn't really get acceptable until windows 98 and even then it wasn't good, so I'm not surprised the USB Ethernet device didn't work out.

simtel20 5y ago
It sounds like a card was purchased and installed in the PC.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Yeah, USB + Ethernet [+ Firewire] all-in-one cards used to be reasonably common, because many motherboards in the PII-PIII time didn't have USB or only had two USB ports, and a lot also did not have an on-board Ethernet port.
- robotbikes 5y ago
  I could be wrong considering it was over 2 decades ago and I never verified the floating point bug. There were no expansion ports on the computer and so I was using one of the built-in USB ports as that was the only expansion possible. This seems like the motherboard it would have used https://pb.retropc.se/770.html https://pb.retropc.se/770.html But yeah windows 95 did have very limited USB support based upon the 2nd service pack if I remember correctly but it did not really work very well.