Talk:List of 3Com products

Latest comment: 1 year ago by Gah4 in topic 3C501

3C501

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There needs to be somewhere in Wikipedia mention of the 3C501, the first 3com NIC for the IBM PC. Before this, networking, and especially IP, was considered only for big computers. Gah4 (talk) 22:13, 30 March 2020 (UTC)Reply

The 3C501 was the second 3Com NIC for the IBM PC, not the first. Jamplevia (talk) 11:58, 22 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think I knew that, but the 3C501 is the oldest I ever saw, had, and might still have. As well as I know it, the 500 and 501 are similar. Gah4 (talk) 18:39, 21 December 2022 (UTC)Reply
If I remember the story, there was a networking conference where someone, might be IBM, was talking about their Tokenring board for ISA bus. They mentioned that if one found an Ethernet board for under $1000, they should buy it. Next talk was 3COM announcing theirs for $999. I presume the 3C500. Gah4 (talk) 18:42, 21 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

EtherSeries, EtherLink, EtherShare and other 3Com products in this lineage

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Jamplevia (talk) 11:56, 22 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Oldest 3Com cards

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4.1BSD (which is a family of BSD release, they did not use "point releases", etc. they made changes to the OS and sent out what amounted to various snapshots using "4.1BSD" as the version number over and over again. There are 4.1a, 4.1c1 and 4.1c2 but there are many more just labeled 4.1) contains a driver "ec". Source code files are present, if_ec.c, etc. that have 1982 and 1983 in the comments. There is a good chance the code in the ec driver came from the BBN TCP/IP stack, it's worth looking for WP:RS for that.

... March of 81. The 3C100 was a 10 megabit per second Ethernet transceiver which we fondly called the “brick”. The 3C100 was the transceiver for a family of three Ethernet adapters: one for the QBUS, which was for small PDP-11’s, one for the UNIBUS, which was for big PDP-11’s and VAX’s, and then one for the Multibus, which was an Intel standard.

Sun-2 systems have 3Com 3c400 boards which are multibus. Bitsavers has manuals from 1982. Sun-2 system ran SunOS 1.0 which was based on 4.1BSD.


Jamplevia (talk) 14:47, 21 December 2022 (UTC)Reply