Anybody remember non-plug n play?

[blakerwry]

Heh, i'm fooling around with an old 486 and I am gleefully remembering the days of pre plug n play motherboards and hardware...

if you're lucky the hardware comes with bootable DOS disks that allow you to auto configure the correct interupts and memory ranges... assuming that auto config works...

if you're not so lucky you're stuck using some archaic tool like MSD to lookup your used IRQ's and see what's available... then you have to hope that your hardware supports the free IRQ's in your system.. if not you have to jugle everything around to try and find a happy compromise on your system...

worse yet are the cards that actually have jumpers to set the IRQ... now those are a pain!

oh well, hopefully i can get this firewall working.


Anybody have any interesting stories or comments to add about plug n play or lack of?

 

[blakerwry]

btw, why can I never get my 3com 509 cards working in linux? is it just me? those damn things

 

[Mickey]

*shudders* The days before plug-and-play (or even "plug-and-pray" ) were painful ones for me. DOS drivers that came on those 5.25 floppies. Tinkering with your autoexec.bat and config.sys file to deal with the TSR programs that ate up your minuscule RAM.

I was always more of a dabbler with computers, rather than someone hardcore. Knew (and still know) just enough to build a system and basic troubleshooting. Nothing horribly complex.

 

[Santilli]

Non_PnP is why God created macs...
s
:council:

 

[blakerwry]

woot.. i got coyote linux working on my non-plug-n-pray 486... had to use 2 ne2000 NICS to get this router up and going...

one's a linksys lne2000, and the other an SMC EZcard10.

woot for generic NICs!


maybe it's just me, but things seem a little faster too...

 

[blakerwry]

huh, switched back to the router and the speed increase is still there.. noticed that the DNS server addresses hat the DHCP server is handing out is updated from last time I my router grabbed an IP... that or the modem reboot must be responsible.

 

[blakerwry]

btw, this was DAMN easy to setup (excluding all the rebooting I had to do to set IRQ's on my NICs, digging through floppies to find the right disks, etc)


http://www.coyotelinux.com/


You can set it up from windows and copy the image to a floppy... the floppy is a bootable linux firewall that requires no user intervention once inserted into the host machine and booted up. There is an SSH interface to control the router.

Coyote rquires nothing more than a 386 CPU, 12MB RAM, and a floppy drive. For the windows setup you will need atleast a 486 DX though.

Coyote also supports a DMZ the same way as smoothwall. Port forwarding instructions are in the FAQ for running web/FTP/etc services behind the router.

Overall a great product.

 

[Jan Kivar]

Non-plug-n-play was fun, and if You knew what You were doing You were just fine. IRQs, DMAs and base addresses configured with jumpers were great, as the software then was very IRQ-dependant. All games required sound setup. Nowadays it isn't needed. Only the modem setup is similar with all the settings.

BTW, is the design of PCI "flawed" so that You can have only four IRQ lines?

Cheers,

Jan

 

[Howell]

btw, why can I never get my 3com 509 cards working in linux? is it just me? those damn things

I had no problem using 3c509a,b,c cards with my pre-2.0 Smoothwall. Did you specify the media connectory and turn off p-n-p. Linux doesn't like those cards (only?) when they are in p-n-p mode. I actually have a bunch of these card to get rid of if you are interested.

 

[Buck]

Non_PnP is why God created macs...
s

Indeed! The first time I sat behind the console of a MAC system (I think it was 1987), I just laughed at the Neanderthal interface of a PC, and the joke that DOS command lines can be.

 

[Mercutio]

... and just to start a new argument, an experienced user of that "primitive" DOS shell could do things that as recently as OS 9, Macs STILL couldn't handle, like use wildcards in filenames.

80x24 forever!

Non-plug-and-play stuff isn't really so bad. The big deal is the learning curve to understanding how everything goes together. Once you're there, it's not even an issue.

 

[Buck]

... and just to start a new argument, an experienced user of that "primitive" DOS shell could do things that as recently as OS 9, Macs STILL couldn't handle, like use wildcards in filenames.

Let's make it so.

When the MAC was introduced, the GUI accompanied with this small wonder far outweighed any command line benefits that the rare user would need for doing office, graphic, or home work. I remember using the PLOT command in order to make a banner, how much easier it was to just highlight the text with the mouse, change the font size, change the layout to lanscape and a way you go. Today, I am no longer a fan of MACs. They are over priced systems that rely on the laurels of their past success.

 

[blakerwry]

Non-plug-and-play stuff isn't really so bad. The big deal is the learning curve to understanding how everything goes together. Once you're there, it's not even an issue.

i don't mind a few non-PnP stuff in my computer, but when you load it up with hardware and you don't even have the mobo to assign IRQs and memory addresses you can run into problems..

most hardware only seems to support 4 or so different IRQs(esp jumpered hardware), sometimes you'll get lucky and get something that supports 7 or so... if you have lots of hardware you can find that you just cannot get things installed without having to share IRQ's.... which doesn't work w/ non-PnP devices.


I learned all this along time ago so it's not really an issue, especially since I don't have to deal with it much anymore.

For someone who started out in PnP world I would think it would be hard for them to understand these things as most of the hardware addressing is going on completely behind the scenes in modern OSes.

had no problem using 3c509a,b,c cards with my pre-2.0 Smoothwall. Did you specify the media connectory and turn off p-n-p. Linux doesn't like those cards (only?) when they are in p-n-p mode. I actually have a bunch of these card to get rid of if you are interested.

I think that is my problem... My current 3c5x9cfg rogram does not give me the option for PnP mode.. i thought i remembered seeing it, but maybe i'm mistaken.. I have manually set the base memory address and IRQs but I get an insmod error on boot...

do you have a copy of the original program?


My problem w/ smoothwall, however, was that I selected the NIC and it would say that it couldnt find it, but it would not ever bring up a screen where I can manually enter in the hardware addresses of where the cards were located. This goes for all NICs that I tried... I think it's just a 2.0 beta5 thing.. i never got around to trying release 1.0.

 

[Howell]

http://www.whstrain.us/sf/3com/

PS. When I used the non-2.x version of Smoothwall the cards were auto-detected.

 

[Santilli]

Macs suffer from a long time of lack of competition.

They have had a monopoly on their little market, both hardware, and software, and have made large profit % compared to PC's. This leads to bloated, inefficent, companies.

Going 64 bit, really first for current desktops, is going to be real intresting, speedwise. Anyway, the mac tax is just too much, component
wise. A processor upgrade for my Beige is 500 bucks. I won't go into
the pc stuff I could buy with that kind of money.

Plus, currently, all my mac stuff has value so low, it's not worth selling.
Plus, being in education, I can hold on to the mac and use it for different things.

For example, the same speed upgrade for a 400 mhz pc is about 150 dollars...

gs

 

[GIANT]

Non_PnP is why God created macs...

Actually it was half Apple (the O/S part) and half Texas Instruments' (NuBus).

NuBus was used in a few other obscure computers. I used one of these obscure computers once -- a Thinking Machines box.

 

[GIANT]

*shudders* The days before plug-and-play (or even "plug-and-pray" ) were painful ones for me. DOS drivers that came on those 5.25 floppies. Tinkering with your autoexec.bat and config.sys file to deal with the TSR programs that ate up your minuscule RAM...

I guess you never used plug-n-play EISA configurations back in '92-ish.

EISA plug-n-play technology was the foundation for what became ISA plug-n-play a little later on ('94-ish).

 

[Mickey]

Nope, didn't have to deal with EISA. My first PC was a 286-12 with 640K RAM, back around 1988. My next system was a 486-33, maybe around 1991? 1992? I think it only had ISA slots, no VLB. The next jump was to a Pentium 100 with PCI slots.