What is a Smartnet Arnet card?

From: Stuart Johnson <ssj152_at_charter.net>
Date: Thu Apr 17 22:19:00 2003

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Marshall" <martinm_at_allwest.net>
To: <cctalk_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 3:18 PM
Subject: Re: What is a Smartnet Arnet card?


> Joe wrote:
> > Found this this morning. Full length 16 ISAcard for a PC. Marked
"Arnet Smartport" "Made in USA" and "Copyright 1985 Arnet Corporation". It
has a daughterboard marked "Arnet Smart Plus 4". The main board has two
copper shielded 34 pin ribbon cables that extend out the back panel. Snybody
know what this is?
> >
> > Joe
>
> This is a serial port board. The ribbon cables go to breakout boxes
> that contain the serial port connectors. I think that Digi acquired
> Arnet.
>
> Martin


The Arnet "Smart" cards had on-card microprocessor and buffering for better
throughput and lower main cpu utilization. The other "non-smart" cards were
more like a plain old serial card on a PC, differing mostly in that they had
more than 2 ports.

I have a 4-port Arnet card (non-smart) that has a (large) ISA card, a ribbon
cable, and an external mounting plate with a "breakout box" (built for a max
of 8 ports), with 4 connectors loaded. I used it with SCO UNIX and it worked
fine, actually better than the SCO UNIX did :-) It is very difficult to
develop C code with a compiler that dumps core every time I try to generate
a listing file...(dang M$ compiler!).

Digi DID acquire Arnet some time back. Last time I looked, Digi still had
some drivers and documentation for the Arnet stuff on their web site.

Stuart Johnson
Received on Thu Apr 17 2003 - 22:19:00 BST