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Seeking Drivers for Unknown Apple Ethernet Card?
rbanffy asks: "Does anybody know what this card is? I am resurrecting an old Macintosh LC II and would like to attach it to a network. The card was inside it, but the hard disk had no drivers. It is an LC-PDS Ethernet card with RJ-45 and BNC connectors. The important parts seem to be a SMC 91c92 chip and an EPROM (haven't seen one in years) labeled 'LC ROM 44F0'. Could one of you can identify this critter and point me to the correct drivers?"
News for nerd. Obscure stuff that matters to one person.
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
Actually, I'd say that those are mostly more sensible than this one.
/proc/pci for any information. There's probably some kind of equivalent for the LC.
The submitter committed a number of grievious violations of netiquette.
* The submitter already knows part numbers. This is a Google problem. He should have already looked these up and need no help with these.
* If the submitter is unable to find part numbers, software procedures should have been tried. I'm not sure (never owned an LC-era machine) but if I wanted to know what a strange PCI card was, I'd pop it in my x86 Linux box and check
* A picture is unlikely to help. Asking people to tear up their LCs for similar-looking cards is ridiculous.
* This question should, if the submitter could obtain *no* information at all themselves, then have gone to a classic Mac specific tech forum. Apple-based, one of the Usenet groups, IRC. All three should have been tried.
* In general, old hardware identification is a pretty drudge task. It's not something you ask other people to do. It's time-consuming, not particularly interesting, and a waste of time, since it's not going to be useful to other people. The kind of tech questions you want to ask (and gurus want to answer) are those that will help others as well. If you can't fix this yourself, instead of asking a quarter-million people to spend hours of skilled time solving your problem, buy a bloody used Ethernet card. I don't care who you are, you can afford it. People throw these things out.
The degeneration of Ask Slashdot is wildly frusterating to me. Ask Slashdot really is a useful feature, but it's incredibly abused. On the up side, it allows people to ask questions that require more feedback than just a poll. For example, "What is your favorite set of Google tricks?" or "What security procedures do you use for SSH key distribution?" Here we have something that will be useful and interesting to many techies, but will not be available on the Web. Furthermore, any of these are likely to produce futher conversation. This differs wildly from stories like the current one, which are of no use to anyoen but the submitter.
The other way Ask Slashdot is frequently abused is to post stories that are too uninteresting or biased to be accepted in the regular categories. Frequently, these take the form of "blah blah blah How do you feel about this? What suggestions do you have for SCO/Microsoft/etc?" This is simply not an appropriate forum for stories like this. If they aren't interesting enough for the proper categories, they aren't interesting enough to be on Slashdot.
The editors are also at fault for allowing so many poor Ask Slashdots to slip by.
May we never see th