On 5/20/21 8:01 PM, Randy Dawson via cctalk wrote:
If anyone has ideas about boards or software to connect this original Compaq to the net let me know!
As others have said, I would expect that many 16-bit ISA Ethernet cards to work in 8-bit ISA slots.
You might look for NE-1000 (compatible*) Ethernet cards. My understanding is that the NE-1000 vs NE-2000 was 8-bit vs 16-bit (respectively). I would expect most, if not all NE-1xxx / NE-2xxx models to work as the subsets within the 1k / 2k range were effectively still 1k or 2k cards.
I think "compatible" is a weird things with Novell Ethernet labeled / citified cards as it's my understanding that Novell didn't actually sell the vast majority of NE-1000 / NE-2000 cards. Instead, they licensed / certified that other manufacturer cards adhered to their standard. Thus there were a LOT of non-Novell NE-1000 / NE-2000 cards. And that it's mostly by design.
Browsing the ebay, I do not find a PC 8 bit ethernet board but still looking.
You might consider one of the parallel port network cards. "Backpack" and "Rocket" terms come to mind. Though I could be completely conflating things.
Then, the rest, a net set of tools in source would be great.
I'm curious to know what network stack you're going to run on that system. I don't know if it's an 8088, 80286, 80386 or what. Each obviously has different capabilities. Though I guess the 8-bit ISA slots indicate that it's probably 8088 or 80286. Though I think that Compaq may have used the 8086 too. Whatever it is, chances are good that memory will be small if not tight.
Having just acquired an old LANtastic box with CDs & floppies off of eBay -- for giggles & edutainment -- I would wonder about using that. Novell NetWare (Light) is probably a choice. LAN Manager / other SMB (NetBIOS) networking from IBM / Microsoft comes to mind.
I think it would be really neat to establish an old PC Network using coax (?) from IBM with whatever software stack they used. I'd bet SMB / NetBIOS based.
ARCnet is probably a choice as well. I'd like to get a pair of working ARCnet (and PC Net) cards to dabble with some day.
I'd enjoy reading more about what you are doing / ultimately end up doing Randy. #hazFun
-- Grant. . . . unix || die
