Testing an Apple NB Ethernet Card (NuBus)

[sailingdarter]

I just came into possession to an Apple NB Ethernet card (NuBus) 820-0417-C. The person who gave it to me said that they were not sure that it worked and since they knew I collected old Apple hardware I decided to take it.

My problem is that I do not have any 68K Macs with NuBus. My only NuBus machine is a PowerMac 7100/80. I know on that machine typically you would just use the on board Ethernet, but I need a machine to test this card to verify if it works or not.

Can this card be used on a PowerMac 7100 just to test if it works?

 

[B S Magnet]

I just came into possession to an Apple NB Ethernet card (NuBus) 820-0417-C. The person who gave it to me said that they were not sure that it worked and since they knew I collected old Apple hardware I decided to take it.

My problem is that I do not have any 68K Macs with NuBus. My only NuBus machine is a PowerMac 7100/80. I know on that machine typically you would just use the on board Ethernet, but I need a machine to test this card to verify if it works or not.

Can this card be used on a PowerMac 7100 just to test if it works?

The one, definitive way to find out (especially since you have both the card and the computer on hand) is to drop in the card in your Power Macintosh 7100 and see whether a simple plug-n-play recognizes the card in your Control Panel settings. If it gets recognized, you should have two discrete Ethernet ports show up.

 

[sailingdarter]

The one, definitive way to find out (especially since you have both the card and the computer on hand) is to drop in the card in your Power Macintosh 7100 and see whether a simple plug-n-play recognizes the card in your Control Panel settings.

True, I was just wondering if the required A/ROSE and Apple NB Ethernet extensions were ever ported to PowerPC or if there was a "driver level barrier" to doing a test.

Like I said, I have no plans to use it "day-to-day" I just need to establish whether the card works or not.

 

[B S Magnet]

True, I was just wondering if the required A/ROSE and Apple NB Ethernet extensions were ever ported to PowerPC or if there was a "driver level barrier" to doing a test.

Like I said, I have no plans to use it "day-to-day" I just need to establish whether the card works or not.

I imagine they were for two reasons:

• one, the overlap period of Systems 7.1.2 to 7.6 were developed as dual architecture/fat binary systems; and
• two, to use NuBus in the first-gen PPC 601 systems (instead of adopting PCI sooner) suggests Apple’s support and backing of pretty much all NuBus cards was carried on until the first PPC 604 systems came out in late ’95.

Were one to step back to late ’95 (a time I remember fairly well as a workplace Mac user), the third-party NuBus card market was still pretty robust in the monthly direct retail Apple catalogues of the time. Although a lot of Mac folks were griping (with good reason) how Apple was slow-walking the adoption of PCI (and, thus, opening Macs to an entire universe of PCI cards made for PC systems, with hopes that firmware for Macs would soon follow), the availability of various networking, SCSI, serial, video, and printer port NuBus cards was still pretty strong into the later ’90s.

The rush to move the Mac line to PowerPC in ’94, yet carrying over the old architecture tech for at least a bit, was a bit reminiscent of how Apple later took their time adopting SATA across all their products, or more particularly, when Apple sold the Yikes! G4 — a glorified B&W G3 — with the PCI bus graphics of its G3 predecessor, despite the AGP bus being the industry standard for then-modern systems. On the latter, new, aftermarket PCI video cards lingered about for several more years — not unlike the NuBus products of the previous era.

Give it a try and let us know how it goes.

 

[sailingdarter]

I imagine they were for two reasons:

• one, the overlap period of Systems 7.1.2 to 7.6 were developed as dual architecture/fat binary systems; and
• two, to use NuBus in the first-gen PPC 601 systems (instead of adopting PCI sooner) suggests Apple’s support and backing of pretty much all NuBus cards was carried on until the first PPC 604 systems came out in late ’95.

Were one to step back to late ’95 (a time I remember fairly well as a workplace Mac user), the third-party NuBus card market was still pretty robust in the monthly direct retail Apple catalogues of the time. Although a lot of Mac folks were griping (with good reason) how Apple was slow-walking the adoption of PCI (and, thus, opening Macs to an entire universe of PCI cards made for PC systems, with hopes that firmware for Macs would soon follow), the availability of various networking, SCSI, serial, video, and printer port NuBus cards was still pretty strong into the later ’90s.

The rush to move the Mac line to PowerPC in ’94, yet carrying over the old architecture tech for at least a bit, was a bit reminiscent of how Apple later took their time adopting SATA across all their products, or more particularly, when Apple sold the Yikes! G4 — a glorified B&W G3 — with the PCI bus graphics of its G3 predecessor, despite the AGP bus being the industry standard for then-modern systems. On the latter, new, aftermarket PCI video cards lingered about for several more years — not unlike the NuBus products of the previous era.

Give it a try and let us know how it goes.

Sounds good, right now the 7100 is running 8.1 so I will pop it in when I get the chance. And I would imagine that things that would work with 7.6.1 would probably work with 8.1.

 

[sailingdarter]

Well, I had the chance to pop the card in the 7100. The card appears in System Profiler and in both the TCP/IP and AppleTalk Control panels but I could not switch to it yet. After doing a custom install of the A/ROSE extension from a Mac OS 8.1 install image, the card started working after rebooting.

Thanks everyone.