Looking for stuff that you forgot to throw out

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Sun Nov 29 20:22:11 EST 2009


On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Bill Freeman <f at ke1g.mv.com> wrote:
>> ...  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".

  Well, yah, but that's because PCMCIA was originally a standard for
storage cards.  Then designers started thinking, "Hmm, now we need an
I/O interface, and we already have this handy memory card slot...".
Hence Type II was born.  That doesn't automatically translate to "all
peripherals will have useful ROMs on them".  :-)

  Meanwhile, back in the days before every laptop came with Ethernet,
almost nobody with an IBM-PC laptop would have *wanted* to net boot
one.  By the time PXE came along, onboard Ethernet was standard.  So
there's a pretty small window of customer demand there.

  Google does seem to suggest a few such things were manufactured,
though.  But good luck finding one!  :-)

> Summer or Fall '94.  I'm guessing that's older than RH2.1.

  I think you're right.

> And it was a live CD, before the term became rediscovered.

  Yah.  And people today think "live CDs" are slow.  They have *no
idea*.  Waiting for Yggdrasil to boot from CD on a 486 with 16 MB of
RAM and a 2X CD-ROM is about equivalent to watching paint dry.  The
boot messages are slightly more interesting, but the paint will last
longer, so it's a toss-up.

> It could be that the USB drivers don't emulate the
> registers to allow direct programmatic bit twiddling ...

  In my experience, that's the usual objection to USB/RS232.   A lot
of machine interface software is ancient, and expects to talk directly
to a 16550, with no pesky OS in the way.

> It's pretty clearly a handshake
> protocol on the modem control signals.

  Yah.  Hardly the first such abuse of RS-232.  UPSes are (in)famous
for doing that.  I heard tell of one UPS model that connected
"Emergency Power Off" to the RS-232 DTR line, so when you plugged in
your standard serial cable in an attempt to avoid paying for the OEM's
expensive cable, the UPS responded by dropping the load.  Gotta love
customer hostility.

> I suspect that the only reason the connect to TxD is as a source of
> RS-232 minus voltage ...

  Yah.  My Radio Shack multimeter's PC connection is optically
isolated.  The RS-232 port is attached to a tiny PCB nailed to the
inside of the case.  The only connection to the main PCB is via IR
diodes.  It took me a minute to figure out how it worked without being
connected to the battery when I first saw that!  :-)

> That's interesting, and I appreciate and may take you up on the offer
> (if you don't toss it in the meanwhile).

  No danger of that.  I've also still got a 20 year old, 8-bit ISA,
Western Digital Paradise VGA card if anyone needs to borrow one of
those some day.  ;-)  (What's really scary is, I actually used that
card *within the past year*.  I needed to put a console on an old
voice mail system that only accepted ISA VGA cards.  Hah!  My packrat
tendencies finally pay off!)

> But since I already have the Dell, I do intend to spend a little time on it.

  Suit yourself.  :)  I never thought I'd have occasion to say this,
but: That Winbook will be a lot faster than what you've got.  :-)

-- Ben



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