mrau wrote:how fast is an ftp on a 4.7 mhz box? ever tried to find the limits when it comes to parallel connections?
why is the intel lan 8/16 perfect? were there no ther 8 bit capables around? i understand there is no such thing as offloading anyway,right?
I mean...slow. 😉 If you're really curious, I could hook it up again and do some benchmarking for you. But I'm pretty sure that the network connection is not the bottleneck. The system itself just can't conduct fast I/O across an 8-bit bus, no matter how awesome the drive or device is that's plugged into it. So maybe that answers your question. I should verify this, but I think it's pretty much as fast as copying files from an MFM hard drive to another drive, or perhaps as fast as copying files to/from an SSD hooked up to an XT-IDE card.
The Intel LAN 8/16 is perfect/awesome for five reasons.
1) The packet driver works perfectly in DOS 5.0 on an XT.
2) The cards are fairly common. I was able to purchase 3 of them at reasonable prices on eBay.
3) You can set the hardware resources the card uses (IRQ/"interrupt") with a very convenient program that was designed to flash the EEPROM built into the card itself.
4) Even though it's a 16-bit ISA card, it works when plugged into an 8-bit bus slot on the XT. It even has a special setting that can be changed in its EEPROM to force it to operate in 8-bit mode, meaning it doesn't even try to use the 16-bit extension on the card's bus connector.
5) It has a 32-pin EEPROM socket that can house a boot ROM, but that boot ROM doesn't have to have anything to do with PXE booting. I've got a re-flashed chip from one of my XT-IDE cards plugged into such a socket, and it enables me to use large/LBA/modern SSDs on any standard 16-bit IDE host adapter that's also plugged into the system. =)