Hey Vogons,

so, what about the network cards, and DOS networking with NFS shares with your
"no pentium class" computers? How to get max out from the 486 in LAN?
Do you hook up the computers together and share the HDDs, or just connect together
with a SCSI and call it a day? 😉

So far I have used the intel 10/100 PCI card and Wattcp with some
NFS package over packet driver, which is clumsy enough.
WIth 486DX-4 100Mhz the max speed is still (with stopwatch measurement)
950kB/s FROM server / 250kB TO server (cached read / write from HDD with DN).
(server is Pentium 4, dual core, Mandriva 2009.0 10/100/1000 ethernet).

Long before I knew linux I used the DR-DOS 7, which had a nice but proprietary novell netware server
with its very good ability to share HDDs under the DOS as TSR.

2. ISA card remakes?
Just idea, while I am still occupied with soundcard design.
PIC18F97J60, it has ethernet port, but also slave Parallel port, which can be simpler for interfacing ISA bus.
It could be somewhat easy to make a custom network card our own?

No problem until we have enough realtek 8139 cards with the same price as chip itself,
but ISA network cards are becoming expensive.