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I want to connect My IBM 5150, 5160XT, 5170AT to my Vintage computer network?

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thegenerallee86

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I need help getting my Original IBM PCs connected to my Vintage PC network with RJ45 and be able to transfer data between all of them. These are the ones I want to connect all together IBM 300PL, IBM Aptiva 486, IBM aptiva Pentium 133, IBM PC Series 350 Pentium 75, Power Mac G4, IBM NetVista 8303NUE Pentium IV, and possibly connect My Macintosh Classics eventually.
 
There is conflicting information on that. I'm pretty sure the 3c509 and 3c509-b use the same driver, but there are some posts that say no. I guess I need to get one out and test it. The other options like TP, TPO, Combo, etc are just the media type: Twisted Pair (rj45 and AUI), Twisted Pair Only (RJ45 only), combo has BNC, AUI, and RJ45 if I recall correctly.
 
jafir said:
There is conflicting information on that. I'm pretty sure the 3c509 and 3c509-b use the same driver, but there are some posts that say no. I guess I need to get one out and test it. The other options like TP, TPO, Combo, etc are just the media type: Twisted Pair (rj45 and AUI), Twisted Pair Only (RJ45 only), combo has BNC, AUI, and RJ45 if I recall correctly.
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Oh Good I just bought 3 of these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/165630779830?var=465145598397 off of eBay and they are the 3Com EtherLink III 3C509B-TP.
 
Pretty common NE2000-compatible NICs, for example ones based on Realtek RTL8019AS controller, will work in 8-bit slot. Note that they will require a patched driver. See this thread.
If you want a 8-bit card specifically, I've designed and make an 8-bit Ethernet Card.
 
I am so excited to receive them so I can get them connected to my network and play with them. Now on to getting easier to get network cards for my other IBMs which are a little newer and will probably be easier to find Network cards for. Will these network cards be compatible with windows 3.11 for workgroups, Windows 95, 98 SE, and 2000?
 
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thegenerallee86 said:
I am so excited to receive them so I can get them connected to my network and play with them. Now on to getting easier to get network cards for my other IBMs which are a little newer and will probably be easier to find Network cards for. Will these network cards be compatible with windows 3.11 for workgroups, Windows 95, 98 SE, and 2000?
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If you refer to 8-bit cards, it is probably not the best idea to use them in 16-bit or 32-bit systems. 16-bit ISA or PCI Ethernet cards would be a better fit. 8-bit ISA doesn't have enough bandwidth even for 10 Mbps. Some modifications to the driver might be needed to support NE2000 in an 8-bit slot. It has been already done for the DOS packet driver (link to the thread above). I am not sure if anyone did this work for Windows. A possible exception is Windows 3.11, where for the TCP/IP support, you would likely use Trumpet Winsock, which uses the packet driver, that supports 8-bit
 
I’ve got a 3com 3c501, an 8bit ISA card. . This is in the comments of the Linux driver source code:

“This is a device driver for the 3Com Etherlink 3c501. Do not purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance is horrible, and it breaks in many ways.”
 
I need to find a 3C501 some year ... I've seen one on eBay for a silly price, so it's not that important, but I really want to benchmark it to see how bad it really is.

I'm also looking for another ARCNet card, but that's for a different reason. (I'll port mTCP to ARCNet for giggles when I get another card.)
 
I meant to test it out out some point, but I don’t have the correct media currently. It’s only got aui and bnc. I need to get some cables or transceivers.
 
Reading a description of the card here, and that's pretty nuts if the buffer on the card is literally only enough for one packet. That's even worse than the 3Com 3c400 that's mentioned in the FAQ for running NetBSD on a Sun2 workstation. (The FAQ entry is about that card breaking NFS out of the box because by default the client asks for 8Kb of data at a time, six standard packets' worth, which unless your server is as slow as your Sun2 means four out of six of each request's packets get dumped on the floor every time. Yay UDP.)
 
And that probably works. (I need to check my notes for the desired chipset that is supported by the packet driver.)

(Admittedly, I've not been looking too much lately - real life gets in the way.)
 
The advice already given should be sufficient to get you started. In addition to the hardware for Ethernet you will have to maneuver around the different generations of networking software. I've had good success using Mr. Brutman's mFTP software on my pre-pentiums to connect to an FTP server running on Windows 7. On W95 I use WS-FTP. On most P-II, P-III and P-IV systems I usually run Linux instead of DOS or Windows. But WinME and Win2K both are on my LAN also. I use a shared drive on my router to transfer data using SMB sometimes.

My Pentiums thru P-IV all get either a PCI Ethernet card or use a USB dongle for WiFi. I use old routers as switches and/or Access Points inside my house.

For my pre-pentiums it is often easier for me to use Laplink cables rather than setting up each machine with an Ethernet card. I have some "tweeners" that talk on my LAN and then I use Laplink to talk further down the line to the old PC's that only have serial or parallel ports. I have also used Mr. Brutman's tutorials on setting up a direct connection to a Windows machine and simulating a full IP connection to the LAN or Internet using only a Parallel cable connection.

I also recently started using CF cards on a couple of my old PC's. I don't need them on the LAN since I can just move the CF card to one of the LAN computers and transfer the files directly to the CF card. That works good and it sometimes faster than trying to make a link between the computers with either Ethernet or Laplink.

If your three early IBM computers (5150, 5160, and 5170) are close to one another you can set one up on the LAN with the Ethernet card and then connect the other two with direct cable connections, using either Laplink or DOS 6, or maybe one of Mr. Brutman's programs.

Seaken
 
My best network solution is:
- Some NE2000 cards work in 8-bit-mode in 5150 and 5160. My favorite is NE2000 with RTL8019 chip.
- Take another old computer and install a Netware 6.5 file server with IP and IPX network.
- Install IPX DOS client on 5150, 5160
- Install Microfocus Client for Open Enterprise server on a WinXP....Win11 computer
This is what you can do now:
- copy DOS Software onto the servers disk with WinXP...Win11 computer
- map a driver letter fro 5150 or 5160 to this disk. It is amazing: you have a huge disk on the first IBM PC. The DOS client has the same size limit, it works with drives up to 8 TBytes.
- use 8.3 file names from the root of the server disk, you have no long names on 5150/5160.
Limitations:
- The netware client for DOS needs some DOS memory. So I use DOS 6.22 with a dual boot menu: With Netware client to copy files, without client to run Apps needing all DOS memory,
 
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