
Notes on the Xircom PE3 parallel port Ethernet adapter - networked
http://www.brutman.com/Dos_Networking/xircom_pe3.html
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walrus01
Re: Xircom, anyone remember these, and how awesome they were compared to the
alternatives at the time?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=xircom+realport&num=100&clie...](https://www.google.com/search?q=xircom+realport&num=100&client=firefox-b&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwinp5Si6JXRAhVL2WMKHXYEC5UQ_AUICSgC&biw=1787&bih=1092)

This was before laptops generally had a built in 100BaseTX port and RJ45 jack,
there were a lot of PCMCIA type II cards with stupid dongles that were easy to
break or lose. Once laptops generally started having two stacked type II slots
(two type II slots = single type III slot), it was possible to put a real RJ45
jack in them. Some versions came with dialup modem also, if I remember right
they were close to $250 new...

~~~
compsciphd
I still have one somewhere (well an IBM branded one). I really need to be
willing to throw away stuff

~~~
kwhitefoot
Ditto. Except I think I have two.

~~~
watmough
Mine are gone now, but these Xircom / 3COM PCMCIA cards were totally awesome.

If I remember, Linux used supplicant to wrap the Windows drivers, so assuming
you had everything setup right, they worked pretty well on Linux.

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disposablezero
Ah the clever XT/AT hardware:

\- hard-drive on expansion card

\- null modem cable (LapLink had two cables: one parallel , and one serial
with a pair of DB25 and DB9 on each end)

\- parasitic-powered serial devices

\- Northgate keyboards with a ctrl-alt-del button

\- game port Y cable (two analog joysticks on one standard game port)

\- Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro joystick for mostly-compatible digital support
(supported by Mechwarrior under DOS)

\- Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS/TQS/RCS

~~~
dfox
As for "HDD on expansion card", traditional IDE is nothing more than ISA bus
on cable with smaller number of address lines and pins that were assumed to be
not needed omitted. Pre-DMA IDE controller consists of not much more than
address decoder.

~~~
kenz0r
True, but from my recollection, most hardcards were running MFM or RLL disk
controllers, rather than IDE.

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Smushman
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.

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raverbashing
Parallel ports were the workhorses of pre-usb interfaces. And they were very
easily hackable as well.

With EPP mode it was easy to plug things like AD converters there, for example
(amongst other things)

(Someone could try plugging one of these to GPIOs on a RaspberryPi for example
and trying to make it work)

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ChuckMcM
Hah! For the longest time I had one of those bouncing around in the bottom of
my bed stand drawer. Once I realized that I didn't have a 5.25" floppy drive
to read the driver, or a parallel port on any computer I owned to drive it, I
tossed it out. These days however it would be interesting as a hack to write
an driver for it for a small ARM chip (like the M0 or M0+). Get your 10
megabit tastyness :-) Oh and the SPI port runs faster than that buy hey
ethernet right?!

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spitfire
I had one of these back in the day and even attempted to write a Linux kernel
driver for it. All I can say is bletch, I was glad to get rid of it.

Very surprising that it works with a PCJr however. The PCJr was different from
the PC in that it had a split address space. Many PC programs - particularly
ones that banged on the metal wouldn't work without porting effort.

~~~
stuckagain
Amazing that these never supported Linux. I remember people tried to reverse
engineer them but the project ran out of steam. I guess xircom felt their
business was so strong they needn't cater to a bunch of hippies.

~~~
geocar
There were other parallel-port ethernet devices though (I myself used the
Accton adapter with Linux).

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contingencies
I just gifted one of these (though not branded Xircom, the design was exactly
the same) to [http://www.acms.org.au/](http://www.acms.org.au/) .. I took high
resolution photos before donating, which I'll get them up on Wikipedia soon. I
received it with DOS packet drivers on an old Epson 386 laptop, which would
have been one of the first truly portable x86 machines. Unfortunately though
the machine booted, this year the LCD screen had chemically degraded to the
point where it was unviewable, so the machine no longer functions. It worked
fine a few years back. Someone did get a Linux driver working for this one,
apparently.

~~~
contingencies
It was branded _Accton_ and is now on Wikipedia -
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Accton-
etherpocket-s...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Accton-etherpocket-
sp-parallel-port-ethernet-adapter.jpg) \- as is the laptop in question -
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-
psu.jp...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-psu.jpg)

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lathiat
My best friend in high school gave me one of these as a birthday present,
fairly sure I've still got it somewhere though the rubber ribbon for screwing
it down (which was a very cool addition) broke at some point.

~~~
robin_reala
Hang on, the ribbon was attached to the screws? I always just assumed it was a
decorative feature.

~~~
cr0sh
Yeah - I own one of these. The ribbon spun both screws - very convenient.

