Episode: 1409
Title: HPR1409: Xircom PE pocket ethernet adapter
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1409/hpr1409.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:58:47

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It's Thursday the 26th of December 2013.
This is Hacker Public Radio 1409.
Today is Thursday the 26th of December 2013 and you're listening to Hacker Public Radio
episode 1409.
Today's episode is by me, Ken Fallon and it's a submission I did to the twitch.tv network
and their show over there called The Gizwiz.
If you don't know, The Gizwiz is a Dick Dibartolo, he's a writer from Mad Magazine and it's
more or less a comedy show about the best and worst of gadgets that are out there, sometimes
they're very serious, sometimes they're not and it's probably that is one of the only shows
that I have continued to listen to on the twitch network, continually since it started.
I do listen to some of their other shows, they're quite good good resource for the community.
As part of their shows, they request people to send in videos about old gadgets that they
have, that they knew, that they loved and they simply couldn't throw away or just, you know,
pieces of crap, stuff that they bought that was totally not really useless or indeed,
stuff that they invented themselves.
For this episode, I wanted to promote the upcoming HPR 24-hour show and it was
through this show as well that I got Dick and Leo Report to congratulate us on our 1,000th
episode. So for your delight and delegation, this is the show that I recorded and submitted for
them. Links to the presentation and the video will of course be in the show notes.
Hi Dick and Leo, my name is Ken Fallon. The last time I spoke to you was around May 2012,
where you guys congratulated Hacker Public Radio on that's 1,000th episode. We've continued
producing shows but we still haven't got all to the daily gizwis. Today I want to send in a
submission for gadget warehouse. Recently, I've cleaned out my gadget warehouse which was in
the basement and I got rid of all of the devices that I had bought my own and ones that people
gave to me. The reason mainly is because of this device. It's a raspberry pie. I have lots of them
around the house and generally there are as powerful as the computers that I'm recycling but also
they're very very simple that won't take any additional components. They're all encased in
the one unit and they're very energy efficient to run. So it simply doesn't make sense to resurrect
old PCs and reuse them again. When I was bringing all these devices down to the recycling center,
there was one or two things that I just couldn't throw away. The first one was this. It's a floppy
disk adapter for taking a memory card from a Fujitsu camera. That's a whopping two megabytes.
Last day camera is no longer with us but this worked very very well long after the camera had
gone. I used this device in order to increase the amount of size that I could put onto a single
floppy disk. Strangely enough, most of the computers had no problem reading over the 1.44 megabyte
size of a traditional floppy disk. But the device that really want to share with you today is this.
Can you guess what it is? It's got a printer connection at the side. A red ribbon that goes across
to screw it in and at the back you guessed it. A network, two network ports, a BNC for the old
coax type network and a thinning ethernet which is now a hundred times slower than what we have today.
But this was very very useful. It came with its own cable and an additional wall socket but I always
used this cable which would connect into a PS2 port. And for those new people among you, a PS2 port
was a dedicated port for putting in a mouse and a keyboard. So you would unplug your keyboard,
plug this guy in and plug the keyboard into the back of this guy and that would drive enough power
and you'd have two LEDs, a green and a little red and you'd know with the green one flashing
if it was day to go on through. The reason this was so useful, the model number is 0.pe3-10bc.
And the reason they were so useful was back in the day, computers didn't come with network cards.
So we used to add network cards to the computers. And it was always a struggle getting the dip switches
to get the correct interrupt in MSDOS in order to load the drivers so they'll just communicate
with the hardware so they can get on the network to get, download all the other applications that we had.
As time went on, they stopped using dip switches and jumpers and went to using small MSDOS utilities.
Now the problem with these ones was that every network card had its different
different little program that you needed to have to configure the network card. So in order to
configure the network, those were of course all kept on the network for us but they mounted to a
big stack of floppy disks. So what this device allowed us to do with one floppy disk we could boot,
MSDOS, load the drivers for this guy, pull down all the drivers for all the network cards that we had
in our entire organization, put them on the hard disk and then one by one go through the one
top we got the right one, configure the interrupts. So this guy allowed us to get on the network,
to get on the network. Brilliant, brilliant device. I liked it so much. I actually went out and
involved my own. So that's it. I hope you enjoyed it. They are available for sales still. I saw
them on eBay in the UK for around 60, 70 dollars down to something around 20 dollars.
Just one other thing. Hacker Public Radio will again this year be running its New Year show.
It's a 24 hour show again this year or more actually 26 hours because we do from one of the
first time zone goes into the last time zone. I was just thinking it might be a great idea for
something that you guys could do there on the twit network. I guess it would be a great idea to
do a 24 hour show. Leo, you might even consider getting a tuxedo or something like that.
Anyway, good luck with your guys 24 hour show and we'll probably call in just to say hello
during it. Anyway, that's it. Thanks for listening to my show. Bye.
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