From: richb@jti.com (Richard Braun) Subject: Re: Need 3c501 driver Date: 12 Jan 1993 19:34:11 GMT
nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) writes:
>I'm sorry you feel that way. There is no way to write a 3c501 driver
>with performance proportional to the speed of a 386. What you are
>trying to do is the equivalent to running Linux of a 80ms 20Mb MFM
>drive. Most people would probably think that unreasonable...
My $0.02: yeah, that's probably a good way of looking at it, in this
modern era of $79 10BaseT Ethernet boards. We agree.
When I started at my new company, I found a big installed base of
two obsolete Ethernet boards: 3c501s and Intel PC586s. They work
well enough that it's real hard to convince the paper-pushers that
we ought to replace all of them. Even at $79, 35 of them amounts to
an amount they'd rather spend on something else.
My guess is there's still an awful lot of 3c501s out there. And you
could indeed run many applications under Linux on an old 20Mb disk
drive. (That's part of the beauty of Linux: it sucks up a lot less
resources than any post-Xenix flavor of 386 Unix I've seen.) If there's
enough demand, a 3c501 driver for Linux will eventually appear.
-rich