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  • Hacker News
  • I love your video. It bring me so good memories.
    by valcarvalho
  • Ah, the glory days of finding interrupts, network cards that literally caught on fire, hunting down that one screamer that took down the whole LAN. I don't know why we glorify nostalgia, it was cool at the time but not great. Especially horrible was the Novell 'priesthood' who refused to share any information for fear of giving up power.
    by Jemm
  • Why did you buy such a card in the 90s? Of course you wanted to play Doom or Duke3D with your buddies!
    by jstrebel
  • And to share the broadband cable internet with the neighbors across the street!
    by jbverschoor
  • I quite like these in-depth videos on the history of a particular card... would be nice to see one on the Intel PRO/100 next.

    If you like this kind of thing I also highly recommend this 43 minute history of Creative and the Sound Blaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPa6wRECw0

    by ranger_danger
  • They did have someone from Intel on when covering Intel's switches and he brings up his involvement in the Pro/100.
    by kev009
  • The Intel PRO/100 NICs using the 82557, 82558, and 82559 controllers were a joy to work with on Windows. The NICs performed well and there was some backwards compatibility in the drivers. I have a vague memory of a lockup bug in some Linux driver versions that would knock machines off the network but it was eventually fixed.

    I really enjoyed Intel's foray into networking in the late 90s. Their Ethernet hubs and switches were economical and reliable. It really made no sense for them to be in that market, and they ultimately ditched it, but I liked the simple and inexpensive gear.

    The first chassis switch I ever used was the XLNT Millennium that Intel acquired and rebranded as the Intel "6000 Series". At a time when gigabit Ethernet was still exotic getting to play with one in a lab was a treat.

    Aside: Videos like this leave me with this "Gee, I could've done that" feeling. It would probably be fun to divest myself of the old junk I have sitting around by way or making videos about the stuff before I liquidate it.

    by EvanAnderson
  • Half the Internet was running on these in the mid-90s. Every Linux and BSD PC had one stuffed in it.
    by qingcharles
  • And now their ghosts continue to live and serve in virtual machines like QEMU.
    by kvemkon
  • I remember it being a bit later: like mid 90s was still a mix, things like smc-ultra and lance but by late 90s it was everywhere and well dominant. The price point was very low, I recall around AUD$20. Definitely had NE2000s running on Slackware 3.x, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Win95/98/2K.
    by contingencies
  • And then somewhat later, when things moved to 100Mbps, the 3c905b and 3c905c-tx
    by walrus01
  • I wish they had tracked down someone from Nat Semi for this. I imagine they would have been somewhat dismayed by some of this.

    One of the issues of the perceived low quality is the massive variance in NE2000 silicon. Basically everyone cloned/emulated the chip, but they have subtle variation, features, bugs. So a generic driver like Linux has to deal with a lot of damage.

    by kev009
  • (Russia, 1996, an IT services company) At some point we got a box of no-name NE2000 cards in OEM packaging with just one floppy with a driver in the box. That driver was magical - it was able to configure pretty much any NE2000 even the brandname ones which were PITA to configure with their own drivers.
    by trhway