Xircom PE3 & Combo Card

I just read Gough's Tech Flashback: Intel EtherExpress PRO/100 Mobile Adapter. I installed a few of those back in the day. He nails it here:

"The connector itself is very small and has securing latches which “click” into place to engage with the card. It’s also very thin and protrudes from the card a significant distance. As a result, these things were a pain in the ass to use, as they can easily be carelessly yanked from the card at an angle, causing the connector to crack or be damaged."

It also reminded me of the Xircom PE3 Parallel Port Ethernet Adapter. If all else failed, we could always get a PC on the network with one of them. I never went anywhere without one or two in the tool bag.

(Pic from here)

We also liked the Xircom combo Ethernet and modem card. It took up both PCMCIA slots, but it eliminated the need for the dongles. Of course, this was all in the olden days before they started building all these things into the laptops.

Docker and Windows

I'd been looking at Docker and saw this Slashdot post about a Windows container technology. As I was reading the comments, it made me think of how we used to setup a new Windows 3.1 machine. Basically, we got the machine on the network (with a PE3 if we had to problems!) and copied all the folders down. Change a few config/ini files and it was ready to go. Looks like I wasn't the only one thinking this way.

Jellomizer says in this comment:

"The is to solve the problem is simple. Keep the apps self contained. No shared libraries or dll. To move the package you just move the directory containing the app to an other location. Some will say that is how Macs do it. But I would go further and say that is how it was done in DOS. 

The shared library is an out of date concept, while sounds good when storage was expensive, today we are virtualizing full platforms just to prevent version incomparably.
What may be a little bonus is to give application/process level networking settings so you can just virtual network your app from the OS"