I still have a box with about a dozen of those around here somewhere; They were still useful even well into the era of on-motherboard ethernet because installing the operating system over the LAN was a lot less of a hassle than swapping CDs around and finding out that the drive or the media went flaky etc. Network boot support for the on-motherboard devices was frequently crap or just plain missing, but the 3c905 could slot a proper boot ROM. The last revs of the board even came with said boot ROM right from the factory.
I have a vague memory that there was one particular revision that had some kind of flaw which made it undesirable; It would drop DMAs or interrupts or something like that. The A revision maybe? I'll probably remember at some particularly annoying time.
I remember it being a bit later: like mid 90s was still a mix, things like smc-ultra and lance but by late 90s it was everywhere and well dominant. The price point was very low, I recall around AUD$20. Definitely had NE2000s running on Slackware 3.x, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Win95/98/2K.
And then somewhat later, when things moved to 100Mbps, the 3c905b and 3c905c-tx
I still have a box with about a dozen of those around here somewhere; They were still useful even well into the era of on-motherboard ethernet because installing the operating system over the LAN was a lot less of a hassle than swapping CDs around and finding out that the drive or the media went flaky etc. Network boot support for the on-motherboard devices was frequently crap or just plain missing, but the 3c905 could slot a proper boot ROM. The last revs of the board even came with said boot ROM right from the factory.
I have a vague memory that there was one particular revision that had some kind of flaw which made it undesirable; It would drop DMAs or interrupts or something like that. The A revision maybe? I'll probably remember at some particularly annoying time.
3c509
and DEC Tulip!
I remember it being a bit later: like mid 90s was still a mix, things like smc-ultra and lance but by late 90s it was everywhere and well dominant. The price point was very low, I recall around AUD$20. Definitely had NE2000s running on Slackware 3.x, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Win95/98/2K.
And now their ghosts continue to live and serve in virtual machines like QEMU.