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?"

Comments

Slow news day?

[hool5400]

News for nerd. Obscure stuff that matters to one person.

Re:Slow news day?

[tres]

Sorry, but this isn't the 6:00 news, it isn't even a "news" site. Methinks maybe you put too much weight upon the funny slogan. There's no news published here; it's a discussion space. Topics are regularly provided by the "editors" for people read and dicuss, but that should not be mistaken for something which it is not.

Slashdot is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you don't like "Ask Slashdot" my suggestion is that you turn it off.

Re:Slow news day?

[hool5400]

There's not really a lot in this article to "read or discuss" now is there?

And that's the point. Discussing drivers for a 10 y.o. ethernet card, for a 10y.o computer, is not interesting. Nobody cares. Nobody gains anything from the answer to the submitters's question.

Ask slashdot should not become a friggin help desk for every monkey that comes along.

Re:Slow news day?

[squiggleslash]

The answers may be useful if they're not simply "Oh, it's an ACME Etherquik 2000, you can get a driver here."

I've been in the situation of having to hunt for drivers for not-even-particularly-obscure hardware items on Google, etc, and any replies that explain how the driver was found are going to be useful to me. Getting drivers for obscure hardware is an art, not a science.

Mac Driver Museum

[a.koepke]

You should check out the Mac Driver Museum. If they don't have the right one on their site already there is the MacDrivers Yahoo Group where you can ask.

More future "Ask Slashdot" topics

[LordOfYourPants]

"I have this song stuck in my head where the girl sings about things she can't get out of her head. Here's the .wav file of me humming it. What is it?"

"Ever see that movie where the guy gets the axe at the end and it takes place in the forest or something? I saw it when I was 7. What is it?"

"Anyone ever been on this roller coaster (I think it was in Ohio) where you do 3 loops and go into a mountain shaped like a dragon? What is it?"

"I saw this music video on TV.. everything was made out of cardboard and the girl was singing something about a "point of view." It was really good. What is it?"

"Ever play this game where you're this taxi and you have to pick up people and drop them off? They say "Pad 1 please!" and you have to drop them off at pad 1 while being careful not to land too hard. What is it?"

"I saw this picture of a bunch of red sand and rocks and it was like 10 megapixels big. What is that?"

"I saw this guy driving down the highway with a bunch of blue lights coming out of the bottom of his car. What are those?"

Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics

[Bob the Hamster]

A particularly cool thing about the internet is the fact that you really CAN get answers to such vaguely once questions. I once found the title and publisher of an out-of-publication 1980's russian cartoon simply asking around on newsgroups using only a vague secondhand description of one scene in the movie given to me by a friend who had only seen it once when she was like six years old. Withing 24 hours of asking, three different strangers had identified the movie and provided the information I needed to look up a used copy on amazon.com

Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics

[0x0d0a]

Actually, I'd say that those are mostly more sensible than this one.

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 /proc/pci for any information. There's probably some kind of equivalent for the LC.

* 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.

Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics

[kyz]

1. Can't Get You Outta My Head
   
2. Evil Dead
   
3. Iron Dragon
   
4. Point of View
   
5. Space Taxi
   
6. Mars
   
7. Under-car neon lights
   

Next.

Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics

[Anonymous Coward]

/proc/nubus, but the info given isn't that great.

Additionally, since this is an m68k box, it's highly unlikely he has a spare one running Linux kicking around. Installing Linux onto an m68k box isn't fun, I speak from experience, and given that the LC II is a '030 and he obviously doesn't have the 68882 FPU, it's highly unlikely that trying is even worth the effort.

Re:And how exactly did this get posted?

[dporowski]

Given that this would seem to be exactly what the concept of "Ask Slashdot" was invented for, I would hazard a reply of "Yes. Duh?"

Unless you're proposing that questions posed to the teeming masses of Slashdotia should be put where nobody will see them...

FCC ID

[NukeIear]

Use the FCC ID, on the conveniently not pictured side of the card and look it up on net. The FCC keeps a handy lookup database online, just for you.

Is this it?

[Gleng]

I found this on mirror.apple.com.

The readme file for this driver is here.

To quote:

"Apple Ethernet LC driver file version 1.0.1 This driver file contains drivers for all Apple LC PDS ethernet cards and is installed in the extensions folder."

That was, like, two minutes work on Google. What gives?

Re:Is this it?

[cookd]

See, it is people like you who make "Ask Slashdot" suck. The guy asks a lame question, and (assuming your answer is correct), he immediately gets a great answer. This kind of positive reinforcement is only going to result in even more lame postings.

As long as people can ask lame questions and get decent answers, they're just going to continue asking them.

Re:Is this it?

[Gleng]

See, it is people like you who make "Ask Slashdot" suck. The guy asks a lame question, and (assuming your answer is correct), he immediately gets a great answer. This kind of positive reinforcement is only going to result in even more lame postings.

I whole heartedly apologise for ruining your coffee break, and quite possibly, your entire month.

Looks like a Focus EtherLAN II.

[Myself]

The SMC91C92 controller chip is fairly common, and googling for it found several references to cards based on it. Does "Focus EtherLAN II" mean anything to you? Take a look at this post from 1996 as a starting point.

The datasheet for the SMC91cXXX family is here in case that helps at all.

P.S. I've never opened up a Mac. :)

P.P.S. Unless gravitationally-induced acceleration counts.

Re:Drivers

[unixbob]

"slashdot - news for nerds, stuff that matters"

On a website for nerds, an article about messing about with a 10 year old computer seems right as place. Perhaps you should try messing about with old kit and old operating systems. It's actually a huge amount of fun.

And in terms of job hunting, you are going to get hired based on commerical experience and qualifications rather that what you tinker with at home.

For MacOS or other OS?

[CliffH]

I think that is an important part of the piece you have left out. I've found a TON of links for BSD and Linux drivers on Mac for the thing but if you want original Mac drivers you are probably better off asking on Usenet, a Mac forum, or IRC and see what you can find out. CliffH

Re:And how exactly did this get posted?

[IM6100]

Well, I've got whole boxes of old cards that need to be identified. Maybe we should set up a photo gallery to identify all of them. But I didn't post pictures of any of mine here, so oh well. I guess.

The way I usually figure out what cards are and/or what settings they have is to boot a Slackware boot/root diskette set on the machine and read the kernel messages from the bootup. That's how I figured out the IRQ/IO addressing on the NE2000 card in the machine I run Minix on. Can't do that on a Mac, but you CAN boot up NetBSD, which is just as good.

i just mailed someone at SMC

[eclipser_of_macfinit]

hi,

i know one of the german SMC office's CEOs -- i mailed him the pic and asked him to refer to one of his techs if (s)he knows more. if i get an answer -- you will get mine ;)

greetz,

[//eclipser]

And if that doesn't work...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Find the MAC number on the card. The first 3 octets are specific to the manufacturer. You can go to the IEEE site and look them up there.

It either works or it's broken.

[dave1212]

Wanted to moderate, had to participate.

Any EPROM card will work without special drivers, as long as you have an appropriate system installed. 6.0.8 and up, I believe.

Your LC II can only run from System 7.0.1 to 7.5.5, and those have been made available for free download on Apple's site, at their Older Software Downloads page. Heh, there's even Windows software there! Most EPROM-labeled stuff carries somewhat of a rule of thumb with it.. either it works with the default OS install or it's dead. They were all built to Apple's specs.

..and although I too don't see this as much of a /. question, it does show just how far the good Dot has come. The shift in attitude may only be as a result of OS X, but that's alright. However, rbanffy, you should really post this on something like the XLR8YourMac.com forums or such.. you'll get the same answer, faster.

Re:Noise

[unitron]

"I suppose you also just ignore spam too."

I can usually tell by the subject line that it is spam and I just delete it.

I could tell from "Seeking Drivers for Unknown Apple Ethernet Card?" that this particular "Ask Slashdot" was probably about somebody with an old Apple ethernet card. The only Apple hardware I've got is an old IIe with no software but I still thought I might learn something from the replies, and I did.

Unfortunately part of what I learned (or re-learned, 'cause it seems every "Ask Slashdot" includes people complaining about the topic) is that a lot of people seem to have enough spare time that they can spare some to go into a thread in which they have no interest and complain about the topic.

I don't have time to read each and every last word posted to Slashdot in all the different categories so I generally only read the stuff in which I'm interested and leave the rest for those who care about that. If an "Ask Slashdot" about where to find great rap and hip-hop MP3s showed up in the list I probably wouldn't bother to click on the link, but if someone else gets some benefit out of it then good for them. I certainly wouldn't go into the thread just to post a bitch about the fact of its existence. I don't understand why that's such a difficult concept for others to grasp, and I really don't understand why there are so many people going through their lives desperately worried that someone, somewhere, is thinking about submitting an "Ask Slashdot" to which they might have found the answer elsewhere. Are there other, much more fascinating "Ask Slashdot" submissions going ignored by the editors in favor of the ones which are accepted?