Looking for 3COM 3C905-TX Drivers

[Tothwolf]

On Sat, 26 Dec 2015, Adrian Graham wrote:
> 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.