8 Dec
2006
8 Dec
'06
2:04 p.m.
On 12/9/06, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I have one of the parallel port to ethernet devices...
a Xircom. I wonder if
anyone ever reverse engineered the user interface to the parallel port for
it :)
It would be interesting if anyone ever did. I tried to, about 10
years ago, and ran into a brick wall at Xircom. At the time, there
were few options for Ethernet for Amiga, the expensive A2065 being one
of a very small number of choices. I had thought that while the
pocket adapters would never be fast, every Amiga had a parallel
connector and it might be possible to at least put machines on ones
network and worry about speed later. I was involved in talks with
their technical folks about securing developer-class docs when they
totally shut me down because they "didn't want to enter the Amiga
market". When pocket adapters came up in the Linux arena shortly
thereafter, I made some comments on a mailing list about how difficult
Xircom was to work with and how I couldn't endorse their products as
such. That comment stuck around on the 'net for a long time, long
past the time when I was using a Xircom CE3 PCMCIA NIC with Linux.
-ethan