My 'intranet' : Hardware

10-base2 network interface card for your RISC OS computer
from �25 second hand to around �80 new
10-base2 network interface card for your PC
from a pound second hand, to �20 new - any old ISA card will do, but make sure it has a vendor's name on it, and best if bought with drivers/user guide.
10-base2 network cable. Price varies according to quality and length, but you can get a reasonable 5 metre length (with fitted BNC plugs) for around a fiver.
Two T-pieces, and two BNC terminators.
Price varies, estimate a pound each.

However BNC 10-base2 networking is kinda crappy, so why not go a little further and try 10-baseT? It's benefits are more expandable, much more reliable, and if you shop around it doesn't cost that much more. You will need this as the suggested hardware:

10-baseT or combo (BNC/RJ45) network interface card for your RISC OS computer
from �25 second hand to around �100 new
I paid �30 for my i-cubed RiscPC combo card.
Combo network interface card for your PC
from a pound second hand, to �30 new - a 10Mb/sec card will suffice, as there are currently no 100Mb/sec cards available for RISC OS.
I bought a Kingston ISA card sold-as-seen for three pounds.
Cat5 10-baseT network cable with RJ45 plugs affixed at each end. Don't try to save money by making your own, it isn't worth it.
Prices vary wildly; I bought a set of cables from a 'junk' auction for a couple of quid.
A hub
Price varies greatly, depending upon ports and features.
It may be worthwhile to by a multispeed 10/100 hub if you are going for a fairly large one. However if you are only buying a small (four port or less) hub to get yourself going then you can pick up new units for around thirty pounds.
I bought my 12 port 10Mb/sec hub sold-as-seen for �5.

I did quite well really, didn't I? The cost of the RiscPC network card was rather more than the combined cost of all of the other bits of hardware utilised.
How did I do it?
Dead easy. Find a local dealer that specialises in networking contracts. As more and more people are finding a 10Mb network too slow (imagine, five WinME machines trying to pull streaming video from an ISDN link to the Internet!), they are dumping their old hardware and going for 100Mb components. Thus, there are loads of incredible bargains to be had. Certainly, dead cheap network cards for PCs are ten a penny, but a good solid hub going that price!?!?

Remember, at time of writing no 100Mb/sec cards are available for RISC OS, and as a split-speed network will sync down to the lowest common denominator...
I would advise you to buy multi-speed hardware if your budget allows it. If you have a 10/100 card in the PC and a 10/100 hub, then when you get a 100 card for your RISC OS machine (assuming somebody bothers to make one?), then the network will take a 10 times speed increase and you did very little to effect that.
Failing that, stick with a cheap and plentiful 10Mb parts. It isn't breakneck, but for a small home installation it will be plenty. The 80486DX/4-66MHz machine running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (with a generic NE2000 driver) served a 1Mb test file to my RiscPC (ARM7 40MHz) via OmniClient's LanManFS (NetBEUI) in a shade over two seconds. My harddisc is only just half that speed. However a benchmark showed a much poorer picture. My harddisc managed 1.26Mb/sec average and the Ethernet managed 430Kb/sec average. The reason? Transferring big chunks of data is a nice fast operation. But transferring lots of little blocks (as the benchmark program did) is tedious and slow and has many overheads. The speed of the network, though, is more likely to be 430Kb/sec instead of >1Mb/sec as application file handling is more likely to do a number of small transfers instead of large ones.
That said, I could probably double that speed by using a faster computer at the other end of the link!

Click here for a pictoral guide of how easy it is to fit a NIC into a RiscPC.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws