Acorn A3010 getting online

Just thought I’d throw this one out there, just in case there is a solution. I’ve got a Arm 3 25mhz A3010 (the earlier type with the daughterboard that allowed the cpu to be upgraded, not Arm250) and would like to go online for no other reason but curiosity. In the past I did it easily with a modem but now of course I have no obvious way of connecting it. It has a serial port and not much else. Was there ever a solution to this like a Ethernet to serial adapter or something like that or an Ethernet port adapter for the A3010 that perhaps used the parallel port.

There certainly were Ethernet adaptors for the A3010. They should still be available – try CJE. (I have two A3010 with Ethernet, but one is in 24/365 use and the other is faulty – less faulty without the Ethernet adaptor. The only point in telling you this is so that you have confidence in the answer; yes, TCP/IP can be got working on an A3010 because I’ve done it.)

Whether you can go on line to any worthwhile extent is another issue. You are unlikely to do anything unless your A3010 has extra RAM. If you want a browser, you might have to go back to a very early version of Netsurf, or even earlier products from so long ago I’ve even forgotten their names.

Switches normally do not have auto Tx/Rx swap

Really? Maybe I use too many expensive switches.

Of course, the problem with the A3010 is that if you want to put an Ethernet minipodule in there, then you will have to remove your IDE minipodule.

You could use the serial port to connect with SLIP or PPP, or perhaps even the parallel port with PLIP (I’m sure someone wrote a driver). There was also the Atomwide Ethernet adaptor which connected via the parallel port, but that might be DCI2-only.

The super-geek answer would be to break-out the A3010’s built-in-but-hidden IDE interface, thus allowing you to use an Ethernet minipodule as well as local storage.

I’ve managed to do so with my A4000 and an i-cubed Etherlan card* from cje (goes into the network slot).
You certainly need 4MB RAM but even ArcWeb struggles, easier to telnet into a UNIX server. See images:

http://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5761

*An earlier version:
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Network/Pics/I3_EtherLAN200.html
Mine’s a 10baseT, doesn’t take up valuable podule slots.

Yes, the A3020 and A4000 machines have the special ‘network slot’ in addition to the minipodule slot, so they are much easier to get local storage and networking working together.

Didn’t know the 3010 came without one, that’s a shame.

The A3010 had two joystick ports where the Network Slot was.