<dribbling@thekeyboard.com> (dribbling@thekeyboard.com) writes:

>   NW> The 3c509 ISA cards are better than other ISA cards
>     > because of their autoconfiguration of I/O space.
>     > They're pretty much fire-and-forget. I would gladly
>     > trade any performance advantages of other ISA cards
>     > (are there any?) for the ease of configuration, not
>     > having to download some weird DOS tool and find a boot
>     > disk, etc....
> 
> If what you're talking about is Plug-and-Play then I would
> much prefer not to have it.

I'm not talking about the conventional ISA PnP framework. The plain
3c509 cards have a mechanisim that allows the OS to find the cards,
their IO adresss, and their IRQ. This is much better than most of the
jumpered and nonjumpered cards, where you had to guess at the IO
address, and if you were lucky enough to know the right IO address,
you still had to guess at the IRQ - the cards didn't provide a way to
query this.

> I prefer the good old days when you set jumpers to I/O address and
> IRQs you /knew/ were free and they stay put.

The 3c509 stays put, but it actually *tells* you where it
is. Especially with the non-jumpered, DOS-programmed EEPROM cards,
there's often no way to find out where it's set other than trial and
error. That sucks.

The number of hours of my life I've spent fighting with cheapo ISA
NE2000 clones on this issue is why I now make sure to have two or
three 3c509's on hand, "just in case".

        - Nathan