Circa the late 1990s, there used to be not just this shade in the source, but a message that would be printed in the logs if a 3c501 were used. It read something like:
A choice quote from the 1.1.0 source:
"%s: 3c501 EtherLink at %#x, using %sIRQ %d, melting ethernet.\n"
which is the most deprecating thing I can see the 3c501 driver code printing, in quickly skimming through old versions of the right age (it seems to have been mostly unchanged for large swathes of time).
(I went skimming for this message out of morbid curiosity, and couldn't find it. But I did only specifically look in the 3c501 source, so maybe it was a closely related card doing it, or a not-in-kernel version of the driver?)
which is the most deprecating thing I can see the 3c501 driver code printing, in quickly skimming through old versions of the right age (it seems to have been mostly unchanged for large swathes of time).
(I went skimming for this message out of morbid curiosity, and couldn't find it. But I did only specifically look in the 3c501 source, so maybe it was a closely related card doing it, or a not-in-kernel version of the driver?)