Henry wrote:
I remember those, and when I went searching to look
for more information on them I found something I > hadn't stumbled on before -
apparently Xircom made a parallel port Ethernet adapter. It must have
been pretty painful. The parallel port wasn't a great high speed interface…
----
Yes, I have one of those parallel port Ethernet devices too. But, remember, back at that
time, Ethernet was commonly 10Mb/Sec. I think that 100Mb/Sec was only located in high-end
datacenters and was very expensive. For a laptop that didn’t have a PCMCIA port, and you
wanted it on an Ethernet network, this was an acceptable way to go. Performance wasn’t
great, but most of the time laptops like this were used for TELNET connections to other
hosts on the local network for “GREEN SCREEN” type applications that ran entirely on the
remote host. Performance in such cases wasn’t nearly as much of a concern as it would be
in the not too distant future.
I will try to find my Xircom parallel port Modem and Ethernet adapters in a box somewhere
in my storage area and take a photo of them. If I can find them, I’ll post a link here to
the photos so those in disbelief can see them.
-Rick
From: Henry Bent [mailto:henry.r.bent@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2025 3:54 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Cc: Rick Bensene <rickb(a)bensene.com>
Subject: Re: [cctalk] Re: RS232 - parallel modems!?