3COM 3c509 cards are great!

I have a bunch of them and use them everywhere i can. Nice and easy to have many computers with identical NICs - no surprises.

Yeah 3com 3c509 ISA card. EarthLink-lll.
These where manufactured in 1993-94 and are plug in play in Win95 and up.
Fully supported with vanilla drives in Win3x and WinNT351 and NT4.0
Works great with DOS And Novell, Linux, UNIX, too.

It’s probably the most versatile lan card out there an most supported.
For ISA network cards, this is the one I use in my 486 computers.
WinNT351 auto dedects this card fine and is fully supported.
Win311 with TCP32b network files auto detect this card too.
You need the TCP32b network files package for Win311.
Just download and extract within win311
Microsoft TCP/IP-32 3.11B (found at WinWorldPC)

3c509 is good and easy+cheap to get hold of. Only better alternative I might suggest over it would be the Intel EtherExpress 8/16, with good performance, better drivers - and flawless 8b operation if needed.

The main reason you might have trouble with the 3c509 is its PnP operation ISA PnP is very much Plug&Pray. Of course you can set it to non-PnP with a config tool, so it's not a major issue, but usually if you have troubles that's where to start looking.

I use cards with the rtl8019 chipset. Might not be the fastest BUT they come with rom socket and have enhanced mode 3.11 drivers so you don't have to load dos ones before windows. Rom socket is a must for xt-ide 😀

There are 3c509 cards with the ROM socket as well. 😀

Thanks to everyone for answering me!

Just bought the following cards!

Can't wait for their arrival..!

The second is a 3C509B-C, which is a perfect choice. The first depends on what chip is under that sticker. All those jumpers look like it's very non-PnP, which I consider a good thing. Best-case it's a Realtek RTL8009, but it could be any (other) NE2000 clone too.

You will find lots of NE2000 and compatible network cards, like the first one you purchased.

They are not fast, not sexy, but typically work well enough if you find the appropriate driver disk. You may need to remove the novell sticker to find the chipset for this card, to find appropriate drivers. Most of these cards can be configured in one of 3 ways:

a) Full plug and play. Works fine with windows 95/98 on Motherboards with Plug and Play support, as long as nothing goes wrong.
b) Jumperfree mode, where you choose an I/O port and interrupt in the configuration software, and on bootup, the card will automatically program itself to use these software configured I/O and interrupt.
c) Jumper mode, where the card looks up it's I/O port and interrupt off the jumpers and configures itself with these settings on boot.

Novell is King of the networks.
Novell was all the rage back in the 1990’s
Everyone used Novell and they gave Micro-junk server software a run for there money.
If you had a server running in your business you had too have Novell netware.
That’s because hardware was so expensive and you could run a Novell 3x server on a 486 with 8mb of ram.
NE2000 lan cards indicate that these cards are Novell netware complaint. So they work fine with Novell netware, DOS, and MS-Windows.
You could search for a Novell DOS client install diskette to load the drivers in DOS for this NE2000 card.

dionb the first one has the RTL8019AS chipset! I would love to play with the jumpers to make my 386DX40 built to be connected to my home network! I will try to surf on WWW! Now I only doing it through PCEM and 86box using Windows 3.11 FWG. 😀

canthearu and Intel486dx33 on my 386 build I have Windows 3.11 For Workgroups installed and PC DOS 2000. My 486 build has Windows 95c... Time will tell, about how they will perform and which application and driver package I will use...