Looking for stuff that you forgot to throw out

[Bill Freeman]

> ...  I dunno if
> anyone ever made a PCMCIA NIC with boot ROM.  Seems unlikely, given
> that the whole idea behind a laptop is mobility.

I think that there were some.  After all the M in PCMCIA stands for
"Memory".  The use case, I agree, is another question.  Gang deployment
of new, virus free installations, to all of an organization's machines,
perhaps?


> 
> > Maybe my Yggdrasil disc is still readable.
> 
>   If that's not old enough, I think I still have a Red Hat 2.1 CD
> around somewhere.... ;-)

Summer or Fall '94.  I'm guessing that's older than RH2.1.  And it was
a live CD, before the term became rediscovered.


>   There are (or were) such things as PCMCIA RS-232 cards.  Perhaps one
> of those on a somewhat newer laptop?  Of course, you prolly don't have
> a somewhat newer laptop.

As it happens, I'm between laptops.  But I don't want to shell out much
for support of the weather station.

> 
>   I wonder if you could wire the SD/RD lines of a USB/RS232 adapter up
> to the control lines of the weather station to get sufficient
> signaling rates.  Of course, that would still require you to reverse
> engineer the protocol first.

The customer support person at the weather station manufacturer was
pretty insistent that USB dongles don't work.  I suspect that their
internal micro doesn't have a UART.  It doesn't even connect to RxD.
I suspect that the only reason the connect to TxD is as a source of
RS-232 minus voltage from which to run the drivers that connect to
a few of the modem control signals.  It's pretty clearly a handshake
protocol on the modem control signals.

I'm only assuming that the protocol won't withstand the 1ms frame
sampling that is involved in reading and writing the modem control
signals.  It could be that the USB drivers don't emulate the
registers to allow direct programmatic bit twiddling (which, sadly,
is the way you had to do it in DOS days, if you wanted to use your
modem control signals as general purpose bit I/O).

> 
>   Oh, hey, I just thought of something:  I've got an old and
> semi-broken laptop you can have free if you want.  The bottom sticker
> says "Winbook XL2".  I forget the CPU, but it has 64 MB of RAM, and
> ran Linux.  I just checked, and it has a male DE-9 connector, so it
> prolly has onboard RS-232 with 16550-compatible UART.  No battery, but
> it does have an AC power cord.  The hinge mounting posts in the LCD
> lid broke off years ago.  I stuck it in my closet thinking I might try
> and fix it some day, but never got around to it.  If you're not going
> to be moving it around you could just duct tape the LCD to a tree
> stump or something.  No onboard NIC, but it does have floppy, CD, and
> two Type I/II PCMCIA slots.  (Dunno if they're CardBus, too.)

That's interesting, and I appreciate and may take you up on the offer
(if you don't toss it in the meanwhile).  But since I already have the
Dell, I do intend to spend a little time on it.


> 
> >>  Any which way, good luck! ("You're gonna need it.")
> >
> > Only if I want to succeed.
> 
>   Well, if you want to fail, doesn't that mean failure would actually
> be success?  :)

Yes!  Ain't life grand?

Bill