On 2/13/2025 5:54 PM, Henry Bent via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, 13 Feb 2025 at 18:44, Rick Bensene via cctalk <[email protected]>
wrote:
There was a company called Xircom that made parallel port modems. These
were full modems that were small enough that they plugged into a laptop
serial <parallel> port, and got their power from the laptop via the
external mouse/keyboard port. They had a feed-though connector so you
could still connect and external mouse/keyboard if you wanted. ...
I remember those, and when I went searching to look for more information on
them I found something I hadn't stumbled on before - apparently Xircom made
a parallel port ethernet adapter. It must have been pretty painful. The
parallel port wasn't a great high speed interface; I unfortunately had a
parallel port ZIP drive and it was a dog.
-Henry
Yep, I used both the PEII and the PE3.
https://www.ardent-tool.com/Xircom/Xircom_Pocket_Adapters.html
Hard to install on a parallel port, due to the little thumbscrews, but
worked fine
The PE3 was awesome, though, for a device without Ethernet. The
track-like thumbscrew was awesome if you needed to detach the unit. At
the time, I was using a PC110 IBM Pocket COMputer with two docking
stations and some store and forward packet SW to have my personal data
at work and home. Using the PEIII on the dock was so helpful. The PC110
had 2 Type I-II/1 Type III PCMCIA slot, and it needed the whole slot for
the 260MB PCMCIA drive, so using a PC card for Ethernet was not possible.
Not sure if that dock had EPP, but even the simple Parallel port was
acceptable on speed for me, even for early Windows 95 web browsing.
The link above shows they made a ArcNet adapter, a Token Ring Adapter,
and it says there was an EtherTalk adapter, not sure of the use case.
Here's a link to some drivers for the PEIII:
https://retrocmp.de/transfer/xircom-pe3.htm
Never saw the combo modem+ethernet, but the I was impressed by the
PEIII. When I finally was able to get a Type II HDD, I was able to use
a PC card Ethernet adapter and the PEIII I think got shared with someone
at a show.
Jim
--
Jim Brain
[email protected]
www.jbrain.com
