Looking for 3COM 3C905-TX Drivers - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

witchy＠binarydinosaurs.co.uk

25 Dec 25 Dec

8:58 p.m.

On 26/12/2015 00:45, "Robert Jarratt" <robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com> wrote:

Not too long ago I picked up a DEC Venturis FX 5120. It contains a 3COM 3C905-TX network card. There are some sites around the web that purport to have drivers for this card, but I am very wary of downloading anything from these sites. Does anyone happen to have drivers for this card? I am not sure what OSs this card was supported on, so any drivers at all would be appreciated.

Ack! *shudders at the memory* Horrible things, we did a LOT of those back then initially on WFW3.11 then Win95. I battled PATHWORKS32 and fun fun fun times with 10base2 around police stations in the north of england. Bound to still have driver disks at work, but the 3c905 was THE de-facto card of the 90s for 10baseT with the DE100/DE200 (I think) for thick/thinwire. The 3COMs will work with the bog-standard NE1000 driver for DOS....hazy memories of swearing which I shall take to sleep since it's 2am here :) -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection?

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tothwolf＠concentric.net

9:36 p.m.

On Sat, 26 Dec 2015, Adrian Graham wrote:

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On 26/12/2015 00:45, "Robert Jarratt" <robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com> wrote:

Not too long ago I picked up a DEC Venturis FX 5120. It contains a 3COM 3C905-TX network card. There are some sites around the web that purport to have drivers for this card, but I am very wary of downloading anything from these sites. Does anyone happen to have drivers for this card? I am not sure what OSs this card was supported on, so any drivers at all would be appreciated.

Ack! *shudders at the memory* Horrible things, we did a LOT of those back then initially on WFW3.11 then Win95. I battled PATHWORKS32 and fun fun fun times with 10base2 around police stations in the north of england. Bound to still have driver disks at work, but the 3c905 was THE de-facto card of the 90s for 10baseT with the DE100/DE200 (I think) for thick/thinwire. The 3COMs will work with the bog-standard NE1000 driver for DOS....hazy memories of swearing which I shall take to sleep since it's 2am here :)

Don't get the 3C905 and 3C509 mixed up though. The 3C905 is a PCI 10/100 UTP-only card and is supported by pretty much everything. The 3C509 OTOH is an ISA 10mb card available in many different combinations of 10Base-2 and 10Base-T (some also have the 10Base-5 AUI connector) which was also supported by pretty much everything. There were also some 3Com PCI cards which were 10mb only. Some of those PCI cards even had 10Base-2 (BNC) and 10Base-5 (AUI) connectors. I don't recall these cards being NE1000 compatible and I seem to remember using 3Com specific packet drivers with them for DOS applications. I still have quite a few of the 3C905 PCI cards in use and they have been extremely reliable. Those that I've taken out of service in the last several years have only been to free up the PCI slot for a mutli-port nic. As far as drivers for the 3C905 go, they are on the HP site or FTP server somewhere. HP gobbled up 3Com quite a number of years ago.

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robert.jarratt＠ntlworld.com

3:54 a.m.

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-----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Guzis Sent: 26 December 2015 06:41 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Looking for 3COM 3C905-TX Drivers On 12/25/2015 05:58 PM, Adrian Graham wrote:

Bound to still have driver disks at work, but the 3c905 was THE de-facto card of the 90s for 10baseT with the DE100/DE200 (I think) for thick/thinwire. The 3COMs will work with the bog-standard NE1000 driver for DOS....hazy memories of swearing which I shall take to sleep since it's 2am here :)

That's the 3Com PCI card, right? I've got a couple in systems here and

didn't

...

have any problem finding drivers for XP/98SE. Linux/BSD already appears

to

...

know about the card. --Chuck

Yes this is a PCI card, not ISA. I am in the process of trying the drivers Tothwolf posted links to. Thanks Tothwolf! Regards Rob

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tothwolf＠concentric.net

12:13 a.m.

On Sat, 26 Dec 2015, Robert Jarratt wrote:

...

Not too long ago I picked up a DEC Venturis FX 5120. It contains a 3COM 3C905-TX network card. There are some sites around the web that purport to have drivers for this card, but I am very wary of downloading anything from these sites. Does anyone happen to have drivers for this card? I am not sure what OSs this card was supported on, so any drivers at all would be appreciated.

These were extremely difficult to find, but try these links. At a minimum you'll want 3c90x1.exe and 3c90x2.exe files which are self-extracting lha archives to create the two 3.5" disk images for the Etherdisk XL package. It had been many years since I went looking for this stuff and HP is not making it easy to find now. I suspect it would be even more difficult (if not impossible) to find older Etherdisk packages for even older network cards. Expand the 'Archived' section at this link: https://h10145.www1.hpe.com/downloads/SoftwareReleases.aspx?ProductNumber=J… 3c90x1.exe https://h10145.www1.hpe.com/downloads/DownloadSoftware.aspx?SoftwareRelease… 3c90x2.exe https://h10145.www1.hpe.com/downloads/DownloadSoftware.aspx?SoftwareRelease…

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