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CompuPro Arcnet card - what's so special about it?

pkhoury

pkhoury

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 6, 2007
Messages
290
Location
Bandera, TX
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but is this a particularly valuable card? Someone made me a somewhat high offer on this card, and I've seen one sold on ebay for over $1000. It's ARCnet, which I don't think are used much except possibly in some industrial settings. Maybe one of y'all could shed some light on it.

 
I think all Arcnet hardware devices use a common driver, independent of manufacturer. Which should devalue any particular implementation. But on the other hand, sometimes people with too much money are paying insane amounts for very specific junk - while equivalent stuff next to it can be had for pennies.
 
I’d guess if you’ve got a million dollar machine that can generate millions of dollars of revenue, and you need an arcnet card by yesterday to get production back online, then $1000 isn’t too much to pay. Especially if you did not know what svenska knows, and just search for the exact card you’ve got now.

The rest of us think it’s crazy :)
 
Maybe you should have taken that offer? May not get one like that again. I don't think there is anything special about this card.
 
Its totally unremarkable. If someone offers you > $200, sell it, have a steak dinner, and buy an expensive scotch with the leftovers. Its possible they have some piece of equipment that needs that specific card for some reason - or maybe they "think" they do. It should be equivalent to any other COM9026 based ISA card. These were compatible with Novell's stock drivers.
 
I ended up selling to a collector of CompuPro stuff for $200. Apparently, he thinks he has the drivers for it, to connect to an existing arcnet network with some S100 stuff. I knew the brand just from seeing S100 stuff in passing, but S100 is a a little earlier than my primary collecting goals. I'm still impressed that everything on the card is socketed though. It looks to be pretty high quality.
 
pkhoury said:
I ended up selling to a collector of CompuPro stuff for $200. Apparently, he thinks he has the drivers for it, to connect to an existing arcnet network with some S100 stuff. I knew the brand just from seeing S100 stuff in passing, but S100 is a a little earlier than my primary collecting goals. I'm still impressed that everything on the card is socketed though. It looks to be pretty high quality.
Click to expand...

And I am that collector. I do have the original software disks and documentation for this board, but couldn't find the board until now. Likely few of these CompuPro Arcnet boards were sold, and like most other vintage computer equipment likely most of those ended up in the dumpster.

The software CompuPro included with this board was designed to allow file sharing over an Arcnet LAN with CompuPro's S100-based systems running Digital Research's Concurrent DOS and CP/NET. I have no idea whether or not CompuPro's software would also work with any other COM9206 based ISA Arcnet board.

Incidentally, this is what CompuPro's S100 Arcnet board looked like:
 
hmb said:
And I am that collector. I do have the original software disks and documentation for this board, but couldn't find the board until now. Likely few of these CompuPro Arcnet boards were sold, and like most other vintage computer equipment likely most of those ended up in the dumpster.
Click to expand...

Sadly. I try to salvage as much as I can. This card came from a computer I was parting out. Sadly, it ends up being easier/more cost efficient for me to part some things out. IIRC, it was a clone system. I want to say a generic 286 motherboard in that particular system? Either way, nice to see you here on VCFED as well.
 
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