Pendell

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.

the easy part

the Netgear MA401 was released seven years after the Amiga 1200 was discontinued, so it's unsurprising that it doesn't have drivers out of the box; also unsurprising in retrospect is that AmigaOS 3.1 doesn't even come with a TCP/IP stack, since local-area networks for home computers were still mostly unknown in 1992. so the first order of business was to move those things from my desktop to the Amiga.

a thing I forgot about old computers is that back when floppy drives and sneakernet were the best data exchange medium you had, it was a real pain in the ass to move data from place to place. it’s simple enough in principle, just laborious, and the amount of data I had to move (about 5MB) amounted to about half an hour of work. the most annoying part — splitting files too large to fit on a single floppy into multiple parts¹ — was honestly way less annoying on Amiga than it would’ve been on a contemporary PC, owing both to Directory Opus 4, which is a great file manager by 1992 standards, and to the fact that AmigaOS makes it far easier than DOS to use a fast RAM disk to hold temporary files.

overall, copying the data and installing the software went just as it was described in the walkthrough. but, once everything was set up, wirelessmanager just dumped me back out to an AmigaShell prompt saying that it Failed to initialize driver interface. knowing that this card supposedly didn’t do WPA2 until you upgraded the firmware, I turned on the unencrypted guest network on our router and tried connecting to that instead; same issue. rebooted the system from scratch, same issue.

it was at this point that I began to get suspicious that the card was dead on arrival (despite the link light lighting up green), or at least that it needed a firmware update to talk to the Amiga drivers. so this is when I dug out a second, slightly newer, old computer, which runs Windows 98 and has a PCMCIA slot to plug the MA401 into: my Toshiba Satellite Pro 420CDT.

the annoying part

the Toshiba Satellite series of laptops from the 486 and Pentium era are imo some of the most iconic laptops ever built. this is a laptop computer. you put it on top of your lap. and you compute. it weighs like seven pounds so that’s not, like, super comfortable, and it has a hard drive so if you joggle your leg up and down constantly like me, that’s not great for it hardware-wise, but otherwise it's great.

the only problem is, it also doesn’t have a built-in network card, and both it and Windows 98 also predated the MA401 so I had to figure out how to get drivers onto it; the machine has a CD-ROM drive but I don’t have any other computers with optical drives any more. thankfully, one of my housemates still has one, so I was able to ask her to burn a copy of the latest Windows driver package to a CD-R.

but that’s when I discovered that the CD-ROM drive in the laptop was DOA.

so I dug out a third old computer: my Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDT. (in a bizarre synchronicity, a friend and I had purchased basically the same old laptop. he’d purchased one as-is that he couldn’t get working. I’d purchased one as-is that I couldn’t get working. when I told him about this, he sent his dead laptop to me for parts — but I discovered the problem with it was a broken power button, that I fixed for 50 cents with a standard part from Digi-Key. I asked him if he wanted it back because it was such a silly repair, but he’d already gotten a working replacement, so he said it was fine if I kept it.)

so, thankfully, I had a parts laptop on hand, with a working CD-ROM drive; once I swapped it into the working laptop, installing the driver went more or less smoothly — and the card worked fine! and thankfully, 15 years ago, someone left a walkthrough for how to update the firmware on the MA401, with a collection of firmware images included.

unfortunately, it has since link rotted away and is only accessible through the Internet Archive now. Windows 98 comes with Internet Explorer 5, and using IE5 nowadays is a lot of fun. sometimes web pages refuse to even try to load because it dates back to the 40-bit cipher era² and a lot of sites force HTTPS and decent encryption. sometimes the entire page content will load, but after the last request finishes the browser replaces the whole page with the “this page is unavailable” error message for some reason — this is what the Internet Archive does.

what’s the newest alternate browser available on Windows 98? Netscape 9. where can you download it? well, the Netscape Archive appears to be effectively defunct, but oldversion.com is just barely functional enough in IE 5 to get the job done.

and there you go! now you can download a piece of janky beta-quality internal software that loudly declares on the title screen that it’s only for use by Intersil OEMs so you’re violating the license by using it — but shockingly, this software also worked more or less as advertised. once I managed to acquire it, it was only about 10 minutes before I had the card updated. time to move it back to the Amiga aaaaaaand………

the part where I gave up for the night

no dice. about half of the time, it dumps back out with an error message. the other half of the time, wirelessmanager locks up the computer entirely. after a couple dozen tries I even got the Amiga drivers to connect to the card, attempt to associate with our wi-fi access point, and fail for some other mysterious reason exactly once.

at this point, it’s obvious that there’s not a hardware fault with the card: it put up with being used under Windows just fine. my next suspicion is that I need to address some of the Amiga 1200’s annoying hardware issues:

• The Timing Fixes: apparently Commodore assembled most of the Amiga 1200s wrong, incorrectly populating a couple of decoupling capacitors that were supposed to stay unpopulated. this causes weird issues with the stability of the system clock — affecting a lot of accelerator boards, which often explicitly instruct you to Perform The Timing Fixes before placing an order — and the fix is to get in there with a soldering iron and remove those capacitors. I have no idea whether this will actually improve things, but thankfully, I’ll have the case open already to address the second issue:
• The Gayle Reset Bug: PCMCIA was a newish standard when the Amiga 1200 came out, and the custom IC that drives the PCMCIA slot doesn’t properly generate a reset signal for the PCMCIA slot when the computer soft-resets. there are both software and hardware fixes for this, supposedly; I’ve tried the software fixes to no avail, and the hardware fix for this is to physically attach an aftermarket board to the top of the IC that generates the reset signal itself. from the description of the issue, I’m not sure that this is responsible for all of the brokenness of the MA401 on my machine — I’m having trouble with it even after a hard reset — but it certainly can’t hurt.

unfortunately, the Gayle fix requires me to wait for international shipping, so this post will have a part 2 where I either get a web browser running or give up and buy a wifi232.

takeaways

• all of the parts of this I thought would be difficult were actually easy. all of the old obscure software made by and for hobbyists or technicians worked basically fine.
• all of the parts of this that I took for granted — moving files 20 feet from computer to computer, loading a web page that was last edited in 2007 — turned out to be a huge pain in the ass.
• I’m starting to think authenticity is overrated but I’m still going to at least try to see this through.

1. in case you’re also in need of something to do this on the Amiga, sys/cli/Splitter on aminet gets the highest honor I can give a piece of software in this genre: “it’s fine.”

2. back in the ‘90s, the United States government considered encryption software to be a type of military technology, so most browsers would limit their cipher key length to 40 bits, which the government considered suitable for export — which is to say, easily crackable by the National Security Agency. eventually, after several years of hacktivism and pressure from ecommerce startups who warned them that not allowing decent encryption onto the internet was damaging their business, they caved. sorta. (now they have other techniques for subverting encryption instead.)