C. Sullivan wrote: So, I need a packet driver and a network stack, right? I've found the Etherlink III DOS config utility, so that's probably the card to go for as drivers seem readily available. Does anyone know if the Trumpet stack (hmm, is it even free?) is mirrored for download anywhere? The main Trumpet website is inaccessible (at least from here - I get 'forbidden' errors, but it may be that my ISPs web proxies have screwed up yet again) (The geeky side of me's quite looking forward to playing around with this; I think the last time I used an Ethernetted DOS machine was back in the early 90s :-) cheers Jules

Jules Richardson wrote: If I remember properly, you should be able to find a 'packet driver' on the crynwr site for your card. That, plus a packet-driver compatible program, and you're good to go. Don't know about trumpet, but I think the CUTCP package from Rutgers has everything you need once you have a packet driver from Crynwr, if I remember right. http://opcenter.cites.uiuc.edu/nas/nash/cutcp/cutcp.html has pointers.

Sridhar Ayengar wrote: Something like that, yes. NDIS was MICROS~1's, ODI was Novell's. The first "DOS TCP/IP stacks" were monolithic applications that did everything from terminal emulation and TFTP service to talk to the 3Com 3C50[01]. That was MIT PC/IP. PC/IP got turned into a product at The Wollongong Group: WIN/PC. Some of the folks from MIT saw the ad, recognized PC/IP in it, and said "hey, we could do that!" They got a deal on some green binders and FTP Software was born, or maybe it was the other way around. (Disclaimer: I worked for TWG, but not 'til 1989.) As the variety of PC Ethernet adapters grew, the stacks got decoupled loading a card driver TSR, then the stack TSR, then the configuration, and then you could run network applications. This was still pesky as the stack vendors still typically had to write their own drivers and application vendors had to have different versions of their networked applications to talk to each stack. FTP Software came up with the "packet driver" specification for the interface to their network card drivers. Novell came up with ODI which I think stood for Open Driver Interface. MICROS~1 was pushing LAN Manager about this time (very late 1980s early 1990s) and came up with NDIS. One benefit of these interfaces was that multiple protocol stacks (e.g. Netware and TCP/IP) could share the card. I remember in the early 1990s, TWG had "dedicated" drivers for a variety of Ethernet cards (and one for SLIP), and there was a "shim" driver that provided an interface between the stack and a packet driver. Later there were "shim" drivers for ODI and NDIS too. Before the ODI driver was written, there was a set of steps (long since forgotten) that you had to go through to get Netware to work alongside WIN/TCP for DOS. -Frank McConnell

URL and path? -- --------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- BOND THEME NOW PLAYING: "The Living Daylights" -----------------------------

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[...] Ah. Cheers, thanks for that :) -- --------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Support your local hospital. Play hockey. ----------------------------------

Hi, Sridhar Ayengar said: Thanks...it never occurred to me to look! -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Ethan Dicks wrote: AFAIK, the only 100mb ISA card 3Com released was the 3C515. Its an odd little card when compared to the other cards 3Com released. The driver really doesn't share much in common with the others either. They never really caught on, mainly due to how common the PCI bus became and because of the card's high cost. That said, they do still turn up in the surplus market from time to time, but they aren't nearly as well supported as the Etherlink III or Etherlink XL series. I can't say I'd recommend them for anything mission critical, but they could be good to play with. I think I gave away the only two I had when I gave away the programming manual I had for them, though I should probably find some more to work with under *BSD. 3Com is *very* good about providing programming manuals if you ask nicely too :) -Toth

A good alternative that I haven't seen mentioned is NCSA Telnet. NCSA Telnet not only is a very good telnet client, but it also has a built in FTP server. It will work with a packet driver, and there is also a version that has support for popular network cards built-in directly so that a packet driver is not necessary. The performance of FTP transfers is very good. NCSA doesn't give you a stack that you can use for your own apps. Source code is available. On a slightly related note, I've been working on my own TCP/IP for small IBM PC class machines for about a year. It's in C using Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS. It supports ARP, UDP and TCP at the moment - no ICMP yet. Performance compared to other stacks is *very* good: Test machine: IBM PC XT with original 10MB hard disk, 3Com 3C503 NIC File send rate: 26.5KB/sec File receive rate: 24.6KB/sec Memory footprint varies .. it depends on how much buffering you want in your app and at the packet level. Code is about 50KB with all of the debug options and messages compiled in. Mike