PCMCIA NICs that will work with a PB1400, and Mac OS 8.6

[Project Alice]

I've been spending a lot of time with my PB1400CS\133 lately. I finally ordered a CD drive that works, so thats a big plus. It's still a PITA to get anything over (or from) it though. I hate using CF cards because, and my CF reader stopped working anyway, meaning if I use one I have to stick into a PB G4 or something to do the transfer.

I've been scouring eBay, trying to find a compatible NIC for it. ChatGPT has given me some options, but I also don't fully trust it. I'm aware it can't be a "CardBUS" which is apparently a totally different standard even though it fits in the slot.

Ideally, a 10/100 "Fast Ethernet" would be my first choice. I can't find any that would allegedly have Mac OS drivers. I did find an Intel PRO/100 16-bit PCMCIA card for sale, which should be compatible with the hardware, but I'm assuming Intel wasn't making Mac OS drivers in the 90s. Most of them I'm seeing are 10Mb only, which if I have to live with I will, but I'd rather get a reasonable transfer speed lmao. A 10/100 card would also double as an upgrade my 3400c, too.
Both are on 8.6, but I can update them both to 9.2.2 if I have to.
Any recommendations?

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

What about a Farallon Etherwave?

I dont own this computer however I did read through some Reddit posts that spoke to Lucent WaveLAN and blue Dell TrueMobile 1150 PCMCIA cards being fully compatible with the PB1400CS. Looks like you might need a driver for them but they definitely did exist and worked so I'd imagine drivers could be squirelled away somewhere - maybe on the garden or TD ?

Good luck

 

[Project Alice]

What about this one? I read OS 9 sometimes has support for these 3Com cards, but not always. I can't find much about this one.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

What about this one? I read OS 9 sometimes has support for these 3Com cards, but not always. I can't find much about this one.

In that reddit I linked to - user ckredd in that thread specifically mentioned that Lucent WaveLAN and blue Dell TrueMobile 1150 PCMCIA cards being fully compatible and goes on to state that the driver works with both silver and gold wavelan cards - so I assume a card like this one would work. That picture doesnt show it but on the end there is a connector for what looks like an optional antenna to increase sensitivity. Some folks have taken this card and torn it apart (back when they were cheap of course LOL) and installed them into their powermacs or ibooks like this guy. You can see clearly during his modification the barrel connector which is the same size as the tiny antenna connector of a bog standard apple airport card which leads me to believe that something like this cheap antenna (similar to the ones we see installed into Powermacs) probably would work great.

This is all conjecture mind you - just puting clues I have found online together. I dont own one a PB1400CS and have not tried this myself to verify. The closest portable I have is a PBG4 17 which is many years off from your era powerbook LOL.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand. The other piece of this puzzle is the driver that user ckredd mentioned and linked to. His link is long dead, so finding that driver for macos7-8 could take some time. I imagine its out there though. I went to check wayback machine and see if I could find it that way but the site was down for maintenance. Anyways, I also found this website - Extremenetworks.com with a guy talking about this stuff. I bet someone over at tinkerdifferent.com or 68kmla or macintoshgarden.org probably has that driver/app for macos7-8 but will take some more digging to get at.

One thing I did notice is that it seemed like the card worked natively in that ibook. The screenshot Op has up there is of OSX anyhow. I know this isnt much help, but wanted to talk through and package up my thoughts on what I had found while poking around the www
. Good luck! That wavelan card is affordable comparative to other $30-$40-$50 auctions I found out there.

Good luck