Does anyone know where (or if) I can get 16-bit drivers to run a WPC11 under DOS or Windows 3.11 (WFW)? I can't find anything directly from Linksys - there is nothing on their web site and their FTP site has no documentation for most of the files even though it looks like there might be 16-bit stuff there.
I have a very old and very under powered laptop with PCMCIA. I was thinking that it would be nice to set it up as a desk organizer ( calendar, rolodex, etc. ) and it would be convenient if it could also talk to my other machines through my wireless network.
It isn't going to happen. The WPC11 is a 32-bit cardbus type of PCMCIA card. You're not going to find 16 bit drivers for 32 bit cards. I'm suprised you could even get it to fit in the old laptop slot as 32-bit cardbus cards don't fit in 16-bit PCMCIA card slots.
In theory, any card with MSDOS NDIS2 or ODI drivers will work with Windoze 3.1. A good bet would be the older (not newer) Lucent/Wavelan/Agere/Avaya/Proxim/Orinoco Gold or Silver cards. See answer 1082 in the Proxim knowledge pile for drivers at:
Nope. The 486 is a 16 bit processor. 32 bit requires a Pentium.
Well, I'm still amazed. Cardbus cards are not suppose to fit in a 16 bit socket. Unless I'm mistaken, the WPC11 is a 32 bit card. See: ftp://ftp.linksys.com/datasheet/wpc11v4_ds.pdf Under "Minimum Requirements" Linksys lists "Available 32-bit CardBus Slot".
Well, I know an Orinoco card will work. Checking eBay:
George Neuner wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
You may be able to get it of the Linksys FTP site. You'll have to call Linksys Tech Support to see if one is out there. Most likely if there is one, they will email it to you.
The machine claims PCMCIA 2.1 compatibility - it can take a single type III card or a pair of type I or type II cards. It's a 486 so I suppose the slot drivers could be mixed mode.
Anyway the WPC11 appears to power up when inserted. Of course without software I have no way to check if it is actually working. [ the card is functional and works in my modern laptop - it was retired when I moved everything to 54g ].
All I really wanted was a rolodex and calendar for a little desk in my kitchen. It occurred to me that if I could hook it into my network, it could also look up phone numbers and addresses online.
I have an old wired 10/100 pcmcia card that works fine - but there's no good way to wire the location. It would be inconvenient and $ to get an external wireless transceiver or a power line connect so I was hoping I could get the wireless card to work.
The idea was to take stuff I have lying around and do something useful. I'm not willing to invest much (or really any) money into it and I won't be bothered much if I can't do it.
Argh. You're right and I screwed up. However, I have a bad excuse. Intel released the 486 in 1989 and the Pentium 60 in 1993. CardBus was released in 1995. By the time CardBus started appearing in laptops, the 486 was long obsolete and those laptops used Pentium processors. At the time, I was told by one of the CardBus chip vendors that they would only support development for the Pentium. I've never bothered to check if this was true or determine if there were any 486 laptops with CardBus controllers. Apparently, you have one. As I said before...I'm amazed that the card fits.
Incidentally, one potential problem is that 16 bit PCMCIA ran on 5VDC while CardBus runs on 3.3VDC. That's the reason for the card keying slot. For a while, the controllers were only one voltage. You could plug an older 16bit PCMCIA card into a CardBus slot. It would fit, but not run. Eventually, the CardBus controllers became dual voltage to accommodate older cards. However, there a few controllers that didn't. Before you try the Orinioco card, which is 5VDC, check the CardBus to PCI chip specs on your laptop to make sure it will work with 5VDC cards.
Well, I've been pretending to be the worlds worst programmist for much longer to avoid having to write code. Politics, hardware, and RF is my forte. At this time, I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag and suspect that inflicting my code upon the world might precipitate the demise of civilization.
Nice trick. As I recall, Intel was in the CISC (complex instruction set computah) camp, while everyone else was pushing RISC (reduced instruction set computah). Intel introduced some "RISC-like" instructions claiming the best of both worlds. They may have been right, but they couldn't convince the designers to do much with RISC. Eventually Intel contrived the i960 chip and licensed the ARM chip core, which are true RISC chips. In the heyday of the 486 processor (1989 thru 1995), Intel was a single CPU chip company trying to place their general purpose 486 processor into every conceivable and often inappropriate application. Their main competitor was the Motorola
68000 series, which also was a CISC chip, but had some big holes in their glue chip lineup (no MMU chip for quite a while) and was doing their best to do the same thing. Intel eventually came out with the Pentium, which has a RISC core. Motorola went a step further with the PowerPC chip, which is mostly RISC. Anyways (as the topic wanders), if you knew how to deal with Intel's "RISC-like" instructions, there were some substantial performance benefits.
If you have problems with the Orinoco card under Windoze 3.11, bug me. I have some Orinoco "Classic" Silver cards and a few old laptops running Windoze 3.11 (mostly for radio programming).
Sorry, but you're completely wrong. I've been writing code since 1982 and I've worked with most of the major Intel chips and various of their clones (AMD, NEC, etc.).
The 386 introduced 32-bit mode in the x86 line (integer only - there was still a separate 387 numeric coporocessor). The 486 combined the integer and FP cores in a single chip [ initially the chips had problems - the "sx" models were chips sold with nonworking FP units ]. The Pentium line introduced dual (but assymetric) integer pipelines and double wide (64-bit) memory buses.
One of the more interesting tricks for 486 programming was to optimize for the Pentium instead. The P5's primary integer pipeline was nearly identical to the 486's, but the secondary pipeline only executed a subset of integer instructions - simple, fast register ops. Keeping both pipelines busy meant using lots of these simple instructions. The similarity of the primary pipeline to the 486 meant the 486 could also benefit from using lots of simple instructions.
At the time 486 optimizers were really reworked 386/87 optimizers. They tended to favor complex instructions rather than simple ones because that was the way to get best performance on a 386. If you
*knew* for certain your code would be running on a 486, optimizing it for the Pentium instead could give a 5-10% performance boost essentially for free.
Ah. Brings back fond memories of nightmares past. I still help maintain a packet radio gateway running MSDOS 3.2 and Desqview. I wish it would die so I have an excuse to replace it, but it just keeps plunking away on an old 386SX25 desktop. Yech.
You can possibly extract the PCMCIA chip number from the data on the FCC ID site:
formatting link
the FCCID number on the laptop serial number tag.
If you have the CardWiz PCMCIA driver utility collection, it should have a chip identification program. However, I wouldn't suggest using the CardWiz drivers along with Desqview as you'll soon be out of low memory. Hopefully, your DOS driver collection includes the PCMCIA NDIS or ODI drivers.
Anyway, good luck (and sorry about the misinformation on 16/32 bit).
I don't have that information ... I inherited the machine so I don't have the documents. All I have original is a floppy with some additional DOS drivers and readme files. I've loaded up different OSes over the years to play with [ great to be a M$ developer ]. The speed isn't bad but RAM is severely limited. It really worked best with Desqview and DOS apps.
I did check the WPC11 again in my good laptop and it still works. Just being plugged into the old machine apparently did not hurt it.
Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.