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by anyfoo 1065 days ago
A PCjr? That somehow makes this more funny than if it was a 5150 or something (but equally impressive).

I remember playing around with Xircom parallel port ethernet adapters and TCP/IP packet drivers (and corresponding applications) in the 90s on an old 286 laptop I still had. Almost exclusively used it as a client, though. Good times.
1 comments
mbbrutman 1065 days ago
Yep, a PCjr. No parity bit on the memory even.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Xircom adapter. It's portable and great for machines without ISA slots, but the max throughput is about 40KB/sec. A nice, real ISA card like a WD8003 can do over 100KB/sec on the same machine.

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anyfoo 1065 days ago
Hmm, I now have memories of both a parallel Xircom adapter, and just a null-modem connection with SLIP and PPP (pretty sure I used both). The Xircom adapter might have come after. Though with that, you'd get at most around 10kB/s (at 115200 baud), and that's assuming the 286 has a 16550A to begin with...
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