Things never go right the first time. This is a fundamental law of computers. Anyone who thinks they understand computers and doesn't agree with this law doesn't understand computers. It is an inherent property, just like adding 1 and 1 twenty million times a second. It is the Murphies law of the 20th century. Trust me, I know.
This weekend I tried to set up a network. (Stupid!) This is how the tale goes. Wednesday my best friend Simon phones from PE. We arrange to get together over the weekend, and purchase 2 network cards from his brother-in-law who is also coming down to show Simon's parents his new puppy. Great I think, and start to get excited for the weekend. School drags by even more slowerly just to spite me. The weekend and Simon arrive. This is the first thing that goes wrong. As it turns out there wasn't enough space in the card for Simon to bring his computer. Great. Not to worry though, his brother-in-law is bringing his Compaq laptop with it's docking station so we can still set up the network.
But, we don't have any software to run on the network. Wait a minute, Doom runs great across a network says Simon. I don't have a copy of Doom on my computer. I erased it two weeks ago in my eternal struggle for harddrive real estate. No problem we think, Paolo in Knysna has a modem, and Simon brought his modem with him. We'll just fire up Windoze terminal and download Doom. Or so we thought. We spend the rest of Friday evening trying to figure out why we could upload binary files to Knysna, why Paolo could download text files to us, but not binary files - like Doom.zip. We wish we had a nuke to send over to Microsoft.
Saturday. Simon's brother-in-law arrives and we get the two ethernet cards, the manuals, setup disks and about 10 metres of co-axial cable. Guess what. The Compaq, although it has a built in network adapter (not NE2000 compatible - I'll get to that later) does not have a connector for co-ax cable, only one for AUI(or something - the telephone kind). The network cards have sockets for AUI cable - but we don't have AUI cable. So here we sit with two network cards, 10 metres of co-ax cable (with terminators and everything) and one computer that we can plug the cards into. Contrary to popular belief a network with only one computer is very boring. Simon's parents are going though to Knysna and we ask them to pick up a cable at Ye Olde Computer Shoppe. While they're in Knysna we arrange for them to pick up a copy of Doom on good old faithful stiffies(the ones we understand and trust - sortof). Right, they arrive back from Knysna and we go and fetch my computer. I unscrew the cover and insert the network card. I don't have a screw to secure it so I have to steal one from the stiffy drive. This could almost be fun. Put the cover back on and power up the computer. Everything works fine - no IRQ clashes and everything. The cable plugs into the card with a satisfying click. The cable is long enough to reach the Compaq and plugs ito it with a satisfying click. Anticipation builds. We load the network drivers supplied with the card, the IPX driver in particular. We install Doom. We start up Doom to play over an IPX network. Dooms spend the next ten minutes looking for a node. Something is wrong. The laptop is running Windoze 95 so we suspect the problem to lie on that end.
Simon's brother-in-law spend half an hour fiddling and eventually solves the problem by forcing Windoze to use a specific ethernet frame type instead of autodetecting(blind guessing?) which one to use. We load up Doom for about the hundredth time. It finds a node! Everything loads perfectly until my computer starts to send network start info. The transmit light on the network card blinks on and off at regular intervals. The laptop continues loading, but neglects to send anything back to my computer. My computer stays on 'sending network start info...' and the laptop continues loading to die a horrible death just and the graphics mode is switched to 320x200xblack. Great. As it turns out Windoze 95 is 'protecting' us, and thus Doom won't load. We don't have any other network software. We spend the rest of the night agonizing over the problem until we go to bed in disgust.
Sunday. Today we decide bugger Windoze 95, we'll run Doom on the laptop in good old trusty DOS. But, we don't have a DOS IPX driver, and the Compaq network card is non-NE2000 compatible, so we can't use the IPX driver supplied with my network card. AAAAAARG! In complete disgust we go to the beach.
Whilst on the beach Simon's brother-in-law tells us that the file we need is called intel590.com and it is about 10K big. We know that it must be on the internet somewhere and decide to download it, no matter the cost. A few hours later back at Simon's house we discover that we don't have the connector to plug the modem's RJ cable into the phone jack. We decide to peruse the neighbourhood in search of an adapter. (When I say neighbourhood I mean the other house on the street.) To our amazement they have just the thing we need, except that their dog chewed the plug off the end of the cable.
I guess we weren't meant to get the network running this
weekend. I guess David's first law of Computing is correct. We
spend the rest of the afternoon feeling sorry for ourselves and
playing old XT games - like Digdug, which runs really fast on a
486.