Henry wrote:

> I remember those, and when I went searching to look for more information on 
> them I found something I > hadn't stumbled on before - apparently Xircom made 
> a parallel port Ethernet adapter.  It must have
> been pretty painful.  The parallel port wasn't a great high speed interface…

----

Yes, I have one of those parallel port Ethernet devices too.  But, remember, 
back at that time, Ethernet was commonly 10Mb/Sec.  I think that 100Mb/Sec was 
only located in high-end datacenters and was very expensive.  For a laptop that 
didn’t have a PCMCIA port, and you wanted it on an Ethernet network, this was 
an acceptable way to go.  Performance wasn’t great, but most of the time 
laptops like this were used for TELNET connections to other hosts on the local 
network for “GREEN SCREEN” type applications that ran entirely on the remote 
host.  Performance in such cases wasn’t nearly as much of a concern as it would 
be in the not too distant future.

I will try to find my Xircom parallel port Modem and Ethernet adapters in a box 
somewhere in my storage area and take a photo of them.  If I can find them, 
I’ll post a link here to the photos so those in disbelief can see them.

-Rick



From: Henry Bent [mailto:henry.r.b...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2025 3:54 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
Cc: Rick Bensene <ri...@bensene.com>
Subject: Re: [cctalk] Re: RS232 - parallel modems!?

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