Re: Digicard. What is it?

[bedwards@arthur.st.nepean.uws.edu.au (Brett Edwards)]

webber@werple.apana.org.au (Luke Webber) writes:

>Hi folks.

>Forgive a dumb PC programmer with no apple experience for prevailing upon 
>your erudition, but (as I tell my wife) this won't hurt, and it won't 
>take long.

>My daughter's school has two Apple ][e Digicard networks, and they are 
>trying to incorporate all of their systems onto one hard-disk server. My 
>question relates to that.

>The network is hooked together via ribbon cables to external controller 
>boxes, one per node. The intelligence for the processor is supplied by 
>Digicard network adapters. It seems that these same cards are used in the 
>][e for floppy controllers. Is this correct? If so, are these adapters 
>freely available, or are other floppy controllers in use on most other 
>systems?

>TIA
>Luke

The DigiCard network was originally designed to be an apple network. With cards like the one they have in the iie. This card is a dedicated network card for the digicard server. These cards each have an independant address such thatin operation data that is sent through the net is picked up by a card with the appropiate id number.

The network i set up about 5 years ago was done with digicard being with iie's some mac's (kill kill) and even some PC's. Like the iie the PC required a D-NET card (the name digicard use for their network cards), macs and iigs use just the serial port (well the mac does atleast, untested on the iigs) and uses device drivers to access the net.

Availability of the DNET cards is unknown that u need to hunt around for your self.

Putting iie's iigs' on any other network apart from digicard, appletalk, maybe corvus is just not worth it as there is no way to my knowledge (correct me if i'm wrong peoples) of putting an apple ii on either novell or any other pc without using a router to connect a mac between appletalk and ethernet.

Best option for this network sitsuation is to either hunt around for DNET pc cards and add them to the digicard network (DigiCard supports i think 96 machines) or god forbid dump the apple ii's completely in this other network.

Kryten