Talk:List of 3Com products

3C501

There needs to be somewhere in Wikipedia mention of the 3C501, the first 3com NIC for the IBM PC. Before this, networking, and especially IP, was considered only for big computers. Gah4 (talk) 22:13, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

The 3C501 was the second 3Com NIC for the IBM PC, not the first. Jamplevia (talk) 11:58, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

I think I knew that, but the 3C501 is the oldest I ever saw, had, and might still have. As well as I know it, the 500 and 501 are similar. Gah4 (talk) 18:39, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

If I remember the story, there was a networking conference where someone, might be IBM, was talking about their Tokenring board for ISA bus. They mentioned that if one found an Ethernet board for under $1000, they should buy it. Next talk was 3COM announcing theirs for $999. I presume the 3C500. Gah4 (talk) 18:42, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

EtherSeries, EtherLink, EtherShare and other 3Com products in this lineage

• In October 1982, 3Com introduced EtherSeries: IBM PC-compatible EtherLink controllers and the EtherShare file server.
• The 3C500 was 3Com’s original IBM Ethernet (IE) adapter, introduced in October 1982, certainly one of the first PC Ethernet adapters, if not the very first one.
• March 15, 1983 3C500 specifications
• 3C501 was introduced approximately in 1986
• 3C501.EXE contains "3Com Ethernet Diagnostic for the IBM Personal Computer" and "Version 2.4, (C) Copyright 3Com Corporation 1985, 1986"
• 3Com 3C501
• Comment in Linux 3c501.c -- "Do not purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance is horrible,"
• For those not yet convinced, the 3c501 can only do one thing at a time...
• September 1988 - Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality Did the 3C501 give Ethernet a bad reputation?
• 3Com 3C501 - EtherLink I
• 3Com 3C503 - EtherLink II
• 3Com 3C505 - EtherLink Plus
• 3Com 3c523 - EtherLink/MCA (3C523.EXE contains "%VER3C523 v1.0.3", "Copyright (c) 1983, 1984, 1985 by Amber Systems, Inc.", "Copyright 3Com Corporation, 1988.")
• 3Com 3c509

Jamplevia (talk) 11:56, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Oldest 3Com cards

4.1BSD (which is a family of BSD release, they did not use "point releases", etc. they made changes to the OS and sent out what amounted to various snapshots using "4.1BSD" as the version number over and over again. There are 4.1a, 4.1c1 and 4.1c2 but there are many more just labeled 4.1) contains a driver "ec". Source code files are present, if_ec.c, etc. that have 1982 and 1983 in the comments. There is a good chance the code in the ec driver came from the BBN TCP/IP stack, it's worth looking for WP:RS for that.

... March of 81. The 3C100 was a 10 megabit per second Ethernet transceiver which we fondly called the “brick”. The 3C100 was the transceiver for a family of three Ethernet adapters: one for the QBUS, which was for small PDP-11’s, one for the UNIBUS, which was for big PDP-11’s and VAX’s, and then one for the Multibus, which was an Intel standard.

Sun-2 systems have 3Com 3c400 boards which are multibus. Bitsavers has manuals from 1982. Sun-2 system ran SunOS 1.0 which was based on 4.1BSD.

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Jamplevia (talk) 14:47, 21 December 2022 (UTC)