I wish they had tracked down someone from Nat Semi for this. I imagine they would have been somewhat dismayed by some of this.
One of the issues of the perceived low quality is the massive variance in NE2000 silicon. Basically everyone cloned/emulated the chip, but they have subtle variation, features, bugs. So a generic driver like Linux has to deal with a lot of damage.
Ah, the glory days of finding interrupts, network cards that literally caught on fire, hunting down that one screamer that took down the whole LAN. I don't know why we glorify nostalgia, it was cool at the time but not great. Especially horrible was the Novell 'priesthood' who refused to share any information for fear of giving up power.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 13.8 ms ] threadIf you like this kind of thing I also highly recommend this 43 minute history of Creative and the Sound Blaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPa6wRECw0
One of the issues of the perceived low quality is the massive variance in NE2000 silicon. Basically everyone cloned/emulated the chip, but they have subtle variation, features, bugs. So a generic driver like Linux has to deal with a lot of damage.