Subject: What is a Smartnet Arnet card?

From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Apr 19 13:23:16 2003

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

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From: Martin Marshall <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Apr 19 13:23:40 2003

>    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 m…

This is a serial port board.  The ribbon cables go to breakout boxes 
that contain the serial port connectors.  I think that Digi acquired 
Arnet.

Martin

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From: "Stuart Johnson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Apr 19 13:27:00 2003

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Marshall" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 3:18 PM
Subject: Re: What is a Smartnet Arnet card?

> Joe 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?
> that contain the serial port connectors.  I think that Digi acquired

The Arnet "Smart" cards had on-card microprocessor and buffering for better
throughput and lower main cpu utilization. The other "non-smart" cards were
more like a plain old serial card on a PC, differing mostly in that they had
more than 2 ports.

I have a 4-port Arnet card (non-smart) that has a (large) ISA card, a ribbon
cable, and an external mounting plate with a "breakout box" (built for a max
of 8 ports), with 4 connectors loaded. I used it with SCO UNIX and it worked
fine, actually better than the SCO UNIX did :-) It is very difficult to
develop C code with a compiler that dumps core every time I try to generate
a listing file...(dang M$ compiler!).

Digi DID acquire Arnet some time back. Last time I looked, Digi still had
some drivers and documentation for the Arnet stuff on their web site.

Stuart Johnson

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From: "Rob O'Donnell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Apr 19 13:27:59 2003

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

> "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.

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From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Apr 19 13:28:11 2003

At 10:16 PM 4/17/03 -0500, Staurt wrote:
>I have a 4-port Arnet card (non-smart) 

   Well do you want a smart one?

     Joe

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From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Apr 19 13:28:34 2003

>do that too, for the cost of shipping.

    Thanks for the offer but I don't need the card. Do you want it? FWIW this was in an old Compaq 386 DeskPro (386 20 I think).

    Joe