Recent content by njroadfan

ISA on 386/486 machines was uncoupled from the CPU clock and tends to run at around 8.33Mhz (based on the EISA spec). MCA's biggest advantage was having a "clean slate" and properly supporting bus mastering/arbitration. Regardless, companies took the cheap route and adapted chips and designs...

The Olicom card is 16bit and doesn't utilize DMA/Busmastering. Only thing it has in its favor over ISA is that MCA runs at 10Mhz.

Yes, the Olicom card is the the one in question. https://www.ardent-tool.com/NIC/Olicom_OC2335.html

It won't run "smoother" or "better" on a MCA machine. Amusingly, the only 10/100 Ethernet MCA card sold with Windows drivers was a modified ISA bus design that didn't take advantage of MCA at all!

Even when they were NEW, the PS/2s were quite unremarkable. Yeah they were initially better then the PC-AT, but so were the clones (and cheaper too!). It didn't help that most of the lineup consisted of lame souped up 386SX design boards with 16-bit buses..... thereby negating the biggest driver...

Razor makes a very light clicky switch. Sort of a cross between the Cherry MX Blue with the lightness of a MX Red because GAMERZ.

I had to finally give up my ye old PS/2 interface keyboard on my new machine (lacked PS/2 ports and didn't want to bother with adapters). It was a 25+ year old Chicony rubber dome of all things, but it kept on trucking. Wanted something smaller and picked up the TKL 8bitdo "retro" keyboard...

AURP is something completely separate. The document I'm looking for was released as a supplement to the 1st Edition of Inside AppleTalk. Most of it landed up in the 2nd Edition of that book, but not all of it did for some reason. Just about every document covering AppleTalk networking has both...

Yes, just put it in any old slot and connect your monitor to the XGA card. AVE is only needed when you have a video card that lacks VGA capability like the 8514/A. In those cases, the AVE port allows the video card to "reuse" the onboard planer VGA graphics and only provide enhanced modes. The...

See title. This was available thru APDA as part number C0144LL/A for a small sum of money, but doesn't seem to have been archived. It covers nitty gritty AppleTalk networking details that aren't covered in "Inside AppleTalk" and is considered an addendum to that book. Apple's APDA listing says...

@wrljet The OS/2 Museum made mention of 386MAX recently, with passing mention of the Windows 3.x support: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/386max-and-eisa-dma/

There were a lot of 90s Computer Magazines lost to time. Many of them were fairly well known from Ziff-Davis.

A chip to convert parallel to serial via USB, along with a pre-built design exists: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/LptCap/

Creative did sell a PCI soundcard before the Ensoniq buyout. It was called the AWE64D (CT4650) and was OEM only. It required the use of the SB-LINK header found on some period boards to work under DOS. The company's main motivation for buying Ensoniq was to acquire their DOS Sound Blaster...

Yes, the Shuttle EPST chipset was a popular Parallel-to-SCSI solution. Come to think of it, they also made an ATAPI version called the EPAT. https://web.archive.org/web/20000407192431/http://www.shuttletech.com/products/index_4.htm