TCP/IP, FTP, and MSDOS?

[Tothwolf]

On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> On 12/8/06, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> I can live with 10Mbps speeds if required (would DOS drivers even drive 
>> a card at anything more anyway?)
>
> Strictly speaking, DOS is not limiting your signalling speed, but the 
> ISA bus could be.  There was one, only one, 100Mbps ISA card I ever ran 
> across (by 3Com, but I can't remember the model number) - it had a PCI 
> Ethernet chip and ISA<->PCI bridge chip, giving it, essentially, an 
> onboard PCI bus.  I considered supporting it with the GG2 Bus+, but I 
> couldn't find one at the time for less than a couple hundred bucks and 
> figured my customers wouldn't be able to, either.

AFAIK, the only 100mb ISA card 3Com released was the 3C515. Its an odd 
little card when compared to the other cards 3Com released. The driver 
really doesn't share much in common with the others either. They never 
really caught on, mainly due to how common the PCI bus became and because 
of the card's high cost. That said, they do still turn up in the surplus 
market from time to time, but they aren't nearly as well supported as the 
Etherlink III or Etherlink XL series. I can't say I'd recommend them for 
anything mission critical, but they could be good to play with. I think I 
gave away the only two I had when I gave away the programming manual I had 
for them, though I should probably find some more to work with under *BSD. 
3Com is *very* good about providing programming manuals if you ask nicely 
too :)

-Toth