What is a Smartnet Arnet card?

From: Rob O'Donnell <classiccmp.org_at_irrelevant.fsnet.co.uk>
Date: Fri Apr 18 06:40:00 2003

At 15:42 17/04/2003 +0000, you 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

It's a serial expansion unit. The ribbon cables connect to a "black box"
with 4 (or 8) DB25 connectors on it. Lots of jumpers on the back to swap
pins about for DCE/DTE/combinations, but otherwise no electronics in there.

The unit is a 4 port, and you add the expansion card to make it up to eight.

The Smart port has intelligence on it, to take the load off the
machine. They did a Multiport version which was just multiple plain old
ports that you could address as serial ports at whatever IO addresses you
configured the card at. The Smart port would need drivers installing.

We used to use a lot of them in days when we ran multi-user operating
systems on 8086/286/386 servers!

There is a large box full of cards, and even more of the external boxes at
the office. Manuals too.

I've also got the Smartport SCO-Xenix drivers, and the diagnostic disc in
front of me here (were in the same box as the wyse setup discs I posted
earlier).

If you want copies, etc., let me know! If you want an external box, I can
do that too, for the cost of shipping.

Regards

Rob.
Received on Fri Apr 18 2003 - 06:40:00 BST