found a FCC ID page with their name but just one entry from 1993 and no good contact info...
If it were me would try to open it and see what chipset was in it and go from there.....

Kodiak were a wholly-owned subsidiary of SEEQ Technology, a semiconductor designer and manufacturer of data comms products - https://web.archive.org/web/19961114191916/http://seeq.com/ -(bought by LSI late 90s), so possibly Kodiak products may be based on SEEQ ICs / generic drivers?

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2023-06-04, 10:15:

Kodiak were a wholly-owned subsidiary of SEEQ Technology, a semiconductor designer and manufacturer of data comms products - https://web.archive.org/web/19961114191916/http://seeq.com/ -(bought by LSI late 90s), so possibly Kodiak products may be based on SEEQ ICs / generic drivers?

Yep, I took a gamble that it's probably based on a SEEQ 8005 "Raven" chipset as it seems a lot of the others were from what I can see. (spoilers: it is. see next post.)
Here's another product that uses it, a peculiar "Quad Raven" card that has 4x BNC out the back and what looks like pin headers for AUI?

Next post is going to be about the NotePort though-- just got it in this morning. Crazy fast shipping!

EDIT: Attaching the PDF datasheet for the NQ8005 because I went on a rabbithole search to find it. Someone out there is going to find this thread and is going to need it.

So I got it in today, crazy fast shipping from Arizona as mentioned in the last post. I'm genuinely amazed how quickly it made it here! I wasn't expecting it for another few days at least.
I got it out of the box and got to work cleaning the exterior. it's MUCH cleaner now. it was all sorts of sticky with perished transparent rubber foot gunk.

I got off... most of the gunk. Screws to get in are under the label, so oops, had to break the seal. Inside is a shield made of steel that doubles as a ground for the whole unit. it's connected in two places, one with a plastic spacer, and the other next to the ground cable on the shield itself. It also acts as the mounting plate for the parallel port pass-through cable. Getting that out of the way, and it seems no corners were cut, inside is a TDK FMP5-2BK supplied by Kepco, of which the spec sheet is still available! https://www.kepcopower.com/fmp.htm

Annoyingly, I can open the supply box with ease, but it's facing the wrong way. The only way to get into it further is to desolder it from the board, which is a pain. Boo.

Moving to the business side of the board, and there's a Seeq NE8005A with a date code of 9233, so somewhere in early August 1992, making it only two months younger than I am. Splendid! The PCB datestamp on the far left says 43rd week 1992 however, so that's probably when it was fully assembled. Next to the 8005 is a couple NEC D4164L 100ns 64Kx1 memory chips.

It seems all of the capacitors on the board are either surface-mount ceramic or tantalum, which is a nice surprise. This means the only thing I need to worry about is the TDK supply going, unless I opt to recap it in the future, which may end up happening, as it's legitimately as old as I am.

As stated in the first post, Crynwr has a packet driver for this, so we hook it up to the 386's parallel port and go to town.
I expected it to work as the eBay listing had the power LED shining, but I didn't expect the packet driver to be this thorough.

Got a DHCP address fine with MTCP, and a quick ftpsrv test shows the throughput on a sustained transfer (of a 6MB MP3 file) to be about 48-50KB/s. Not bad! and all I need from it, in the end, so it works out splendidly.

I'm still trying to find the original driver disk for this and/or manuals. It's an obscure enough product in a category wholly dominated by Xircom at the time, that I feel it needs archival for posterity. No one remembers the competition, everyone just remembers the Xircom Pocket Ethernet adapters and they go for silly money. In comparison, this was $10 shipped and I couldn't be happier.

Congratulations, that's a nice find. Being able to make it work with a minimum of fuss is a great bonus too.

Lovely find, and great outcome 👍

Sudos wrote on 2023-06-05, 16:50:

So I got it in today, crazy fast shipping from Arizona as mentioned in the last post. I'm genuinely amazed how quickly it made i […]
Show full quote

So I got it in today, crazy fast shipping from Arizona as mentioned in the last post. I'm genuinely amazed how quickly it made it here! I wasn't expecting it for another few days at least.
I got it out of the box and got to work cleaning the exterior. it's MUCH cleaner now. it was all sorts of sticky with perished transparent rubber foot gunk.

IMG_20230605_112506.jpg

IMG_20230605_104938-01.jpeg

I got off... most of the gunk. Screws to get in are under the label, so oops, had to break the seal. Inside is a shield made of steel that doubles as a ground for the whole unit. it's connected in two places, one with a plastic spacer, and the other next to the ground cable on the shield itself. It also acts as the mounting plate for the parallel port pass-through cable. Getting that out of the way, and it seems no corners were cut, inside is a TDK FMP5-2BK supplied by Kepco, of which the spec sheet is still available! https://www.kepcopower.com/fmp.htm

IMG_20230605_105210-01.jpeg
Annoyingly, I can open the supply box with ease, but it's facing the wrong way. The only way to get into it further is to desolder it from the board, which is a pain. Boo.

Moving to the business side of the board, and there's a Seeq NE8005A with a date code of 9233, so somewhere in early August 1992, making it only two months younger than I am. Splendid! The PCB datestamp on the far left says 43rd week 1992 however, so that's probably when it was fully assembled. Next to the 8005 is a couple NEC D4164L 100ns 64Kx1 memory chips.

IMG_20230605_105535-01.jpeg
It seems all of the capacitors on the board are either surface-mount ceramic or tantalum, which is a nice surprise. This means the only thing I need to worry about is the TDK supply going, unless I opt to recap it in the future, which may end up happening, as it's legitimately as old as I am.

As stated in the first post, Crynwr has a packet driver for this, so we hook it up to the 386's parallel port and go to town.
I expected it to work as the eBay listing had the power LED shining, but I didn't expect the packet driver to be this thorough.
IMG_20230605_115827-01.jpeg

Got a DHCP address fine with MTCP, and a quick ftpsrv test shows the throughput on a sustained transfer (of a 6MB MP3 file) to be about 48-50KB/s. Not bad! and all I need from it, in the end, so it works out splendidly.

I'm still trying to find the original driver disk for this and/or manuals. It's an obscure enough product in a category wholly dominated by Xircom at the time, that I feel it needs archival for posterity. No one remembers the competition, everyone just remembers the Xircom Pocket Ethernet adapters and they go for silly money. In comparison, this was $10 shipped and I couldn't be happier.

Nicely done 😀 - glad the SEEQ connection proved relevant. I did search for actual Kodiak drivers but never came close to an old website on Wayback which might have given some clues. There are plenty of old references thru Google to the NotePort and the Crynwr driver package but the only slightly different reference I found was this (extract) from an old BBS listing...needless to say I couldn't find the actual package elsewhere (may just have been the Crynwr ones in a different form?)

****************************
* LANNet File Distribution *
****************************
HQ: Fidonet 1:2220/10
*********************

**********************************************************************
* List of files currently available as of June 20, 1996 at 12:10am *
* *
* Files marked with a * after the file's date are new within 14 days *
**********************************************************************

*****************************************************************
* Area LANNET LAN: Artisoft LANtastic Patches and Related Files *
*****************************************************************
.
.

.
NOTEPO.ARJ 20949 09-29-92 [ 1] Low Level Driver for KODIAK Noteport
.
.
.
******************************************************
* Compiled by Maximus Master List Generator 1.07 *
* Copyright (C) 1992-1994 Robert Presland (1:243/27) *
******************************************************

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2023-06-06, 06:36:

***************************************************************** * Area LANNET LAN: Artisoft LANtastic Patches and Related File […]
Show full quote

*****************************************************************
* Area LANNET LAN: Artisoft LANtastic Patches and Related Files *
*****************************************************************
.
NOTEPO.ARJ 20949 09-29-92 [ 1] Low Level Driver for KODIAK Noteport

It looks to me that LANtastic might already come with a driver then on one of the newer versions of it. Neat.

I couldn't stop myself and ended up replacing the power cable on it a short while ago. didn't take any pictures because I was in a rush to do it. but, used a decent mickeymouse flat cable from I-have-no-idea-which laptop supply of the 6ft variety.
I think they intended you to keep this on your desk or on the floor, close to a power outlet where there was already going to be a BNC hookup or RJ45 keystone coming out of the wall. in my case, the outlet is on the floor and this adapter is quite a bit of a ways up to reach the switch, so I really needed the extra length. You can't tell from the outside after it's been done anyway-- it's the exact same kind of cable, just many, many years newer. but this time instead of laying down like two dots of what I can only imagine was the cheapest hotsnot ever, over the solder joints for the mains power cable hot/neutral, I just went ham with the hotsnot stick and it's well and truly gooped up all around it and such. it might make troubleshooting hard in the future but at least nothing in that area is going to be going anywhere.

I did some more testing and after playing with mTCP settings and I was able to get the transfer speed up to 72KB/s as well. Not too shabby.

EDIT: Due to issues with onboard ethernet stuff on my 386, this came in super handy last night. in that I was able to back up the entirety of the drive over FTP incrementally without so much as a sweat. The only thing I noticed was that prolonged use does make it get a tad on the warm side. Do have to wonder if the lack of any venting at all was part of the plan... the only thing I can see it not helping however, is the now 30 year old TDK supply. I'm going to end up getting that out of there at some point. but for now, it works.