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.

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]

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"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

[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.

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?

[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.

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.