Lapis the Nevrean

the year is 1992. you just brought home a brand-new Amiga 1200.

the online meeting places of choice are Usenet and BBSes. there are a handful of Web browsers available, including Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb for NeXTSTEP and a couple of Unix browsers written by computer science students, but the Web is still more the talk of CERN mailing lists than an actual production system. your new computer comes with a serial port¹. you buy a modem and terminal emulator software at the local computer store, plug the modem into one of the serial ports, plug the land line into the modem, install the terminal emulator off its floppy disk, and dial something up. easy. you're online, at a blazing 9600 bits per second.

the year is 2023. you want to move 5GB of old software to the 30-year-old Amiga 1200 you just built from refurbished parts.

there are a couple options to get it online in a modern way. you could get a homebrew serial/parallel port adapter made by retrocomputer hobbyists, like the plipbox or the wifi232, but this is boring. you could get a modern Amiga accelerator with its own integrated networking like the Warp 1260, the Apollo Icedrake V4, or the PiStorm, that fix several obsolescent interfaces at once, but this is boring and also expensive. why do either of these things when the Amiga 1200 is juuuuuust new enough that it's got an authentic option?

later redubbed "PC Card" because PCMCIA is a terrible name², PCMCIA was a (comparatively) high-speed expansion bus of the '90s and very early 2000s intended mostly for laptops. you could use it for a bunch of things, but the most popular uses were extra storage -- very early SSDs! -- and network cards.

thankfully, getting an Amiga 1200 online with a PCMCIA card is a road other people have walked before and there's really thorough walkthroughs for it online that only presuppose a small amount of Amiga knowledge. there's a small handful of cards which use the one wi-fi chipset with Amiga drivers, most of which can't do WPA2³, but there's a couple that do. I tracked down one of them -- a Netgear MA401 -- for $25 on eBay, and it showed up on Monday.

1. the precursor to the Universal Serial Bus, serial ports -- aka Recommended Standard 232, introduced in 1960 -- are an all-time classic. serial's only drawbacks by modern standards are the classic RS-232 connector, which is extremely chunky, and the fact that for most purposes, it tops out at a blazing 14.4KB/sec maximum transfer speed -- poor compared to even the comparatively sedate 187KB/sec transfer rate of 1996’s USB 1.0.

2. also other reasons which are irrelevant here.

3. the only one of the three different ways wi-fi can be encrypted which is worth a damn. if you're still using WEP or WPA1 for some reason, please try and find a way to stop.

tried a bunch of different things, but it's been about a month of no progress!

• got the Gayle reset bug fixed! it didn't change anything at all.
• got suspicious that the wireless card was somehow misconfigured, managed to brick it while trying to reflash it. (I think I can resurrect it if I can get an early-2000s version of Linux installed on my Toshiba Satellite, so I might try that at some point.)
• got a used PCMCIA Ethernet card and an Ethernet-wifi bridge! the Ethernet-wifi bridge works great! the PCMCIA Ethernet card showed up in Windows but not Amiga, and upon inspection I discovered that it actually uses a 3Com 3C574 chipset internally rather than a 3Com 3C589 chipset, which is different enough that the Amiga 3C589 driver won't drive it.
• got another used PCMCIA Ethernet card, after verifying that it has a 3C589 chipset this time! it didn't show up on either computer. I suspected that this was because I didn't have the little dongle cable you need to plug into it to actually connect it to Ethernet, so I bought a used dongle cable. no dice¹, so I assume the card is just dead on arrival.
• got a third used PCMCIA Ethernet card which uses the Linux PCMCIA Ethernet driver that one of the AmigaOS Ethernet drivers is based on, and it works fine on Windows but it appears to disagree with the Amiga enough that it locks up while the card is inserted (and, inexplicably, returns to normal when removed????)

after I tried this third card, and now that I've spent about $70 altogether on four different PCMCIA cards that don't work, I decided to finally pull the trigger on one of the (also about $70) listings for a pre-tested, pre-vetted Amiga wireless card on a retro shop's Web site and see if that fares any better.

lessons learned:

• when in doubt "used" on ebay means "assume you're buying an inert lump of plastic".
• at least I can get my old PC laptop online now.

1. plugged the dongle cable into the 3C574-based card and tried it on Windows... also no dice! surprised that a cable can even be dead on arrival, but here we are.