Was there ever any ISA IDE controllers that supported DMA transfers?

[lowen]

Yeah, I remember the fun of dealing with that back in 1991 when I was working at a factory installing 10Base-5 networking; they had techs come through and drop the AUI cable from the vampire tap or the eight port Cabletron AUI repeater (that allowed eight NICs to share one tap), and then it was my job to get the ethernet connectivity to the NetWare file and print servers on each PC. They still had IBM PC XT's, AT's, and various clones, running DOS, as the primary.

There were a few workstations that had special needs and were a bit difficult to get running with the 3Com 3C503 (IIRC) cards. I remember in particular one of the applications engineers who had a large tower with a 386DX16 CPU and four large full-height 5.25 SCSI drives (large of course being a very relative term; they were a few hundred megabytes, which in 1991 was pretty large), cabled on narrow single-ended SCSI to an adaptec 1540, one of the very first bus-mastering cards. The straight NetWare driver for the 3C503 didn't play nice with the adaptec driver or card at all; that was the first time I used the ODI driver stack to gain a bit of extra configurability, and got the 1540 and the 3C503 to play nice, at least for a while (it did crash much more frequently than it had with just the straight 1540 and no network). No, I don't remember the details, since we fixed it permanently a bit later.

I learned a great deal about patience and dealing with very impatient users (he absolutely had to have the performance of the 1540, since his daily grind involved long sessions with AutoCAD). The difficulty in supporting his machine with that configuration drove the purchase of their first 16-bit ethernet card, and that fixed things right up.

 

[jh1523]

Couldn't have been 3c503 then; the 3c503 is a 16-bit card.

3c501 was 8-bit. According to the Linux Ethernet HOWTO: "This obsolete stone-age 8 bit card is really too brain-damaged to use. Avoid it like the plague. Do not purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance is horrible, and it breaks in many ways. "

 

[lowen]

Couldn't have been 3c503 then; the 3c503 is a 16-bit card.

Please see http://www.all3com.com/cart/3c503.html

The 3C503 Etherlink II was available in both 8 and 16 bit forms.

3c501 was 8-bit. According to the Linux Ethernet HOWTO: "This obsolete stone-age 8 bit card is really too brain-damaged to use. Avoid it like the plague. Do not purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance is horrible, and it breaks in many ways. "

We did have a few of those, as well, and they are pretty evil. But, no, it was an 8-bit 3C503 in this particular case.

In another instance, we had to use a 3C505, since it is incredibly configurable (see http://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/photo-gallery/ether-505.jpg for an image). That particular PC was beyond evil, with multiple SCSI cards in the system (one for the hard disks, one for the AGFA large format scanner (in this case, large format means Engineering F size, or 28 inches by 40 inches, although I think it would actually scan 30x42) , and one for a CAMAC crate that controlled a photometer).

 

[jh1523]

Ah, maybe. I have never come across a 8-bit 3c503 (though I have a couple 16-bit ones).

That PC sounds a lot like the machine I used to run a FPLC installation out of. It was a 486DX25 with an Adaptec scsi card that ran several pumps and a sample collector; the OS was OS/2 v2.2 because it was the only one under which the application program was supported. I parted ways with that machine when I changed jobs in 2005. AFAIK it might be still chugging along in the same corner where it was 9 years ago.

( during my tenure of that system I had to change HDDs twice and reinstall the OS+app each time. Lotsa fun. We kept maintaining it because a modern replacement was $$$$expensive and that was an academic research lab with barely enough money to float)