Randy,
I'm a little late to the party, but to get a Compaq connected to Ethernet
look for the following:
- 8 bit: NE1000, 3Com 3C503, WD or SMC 8003 series
-16 bit in an 8 bit slot: Some NE2000 clones, Intel 8/16
- 16 bit cards: many choices
There are a lot of choices for networking code, but a lot of it is old and
out of date. (FTP clients that don't support PASSIVE connections are not
terribly useful anymore.) I wrote (and still maintain) mTCP (
http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP.html) which gives you the following: DHCP,
Ping, Netcat (TCP only), an IRC client, an FTP client, an FTP server, a
Simple NTP client, a Telnet client, etc.
All of this is supported and runs well on 8088 class machines. mTCP uses
the packet driver specification to talk to the Ethernet card, so the card
has to have an appropriate driver. (There are shims that allow you to use
ODI drivers and packet drivers that fake Ethernet over SLIP or PPP.)
Mike