Apple Ethernet NB Card Is Cursed

The Apple Ethernet NB Card is high end a NuBus Ethernet card, with the A/ROSE 68k coprocessor system included to offload certain processing tasks from the main CPU.

Unfortunately, the card is cursed with the spectre of libertarianism.

Cursed ROM

The v1.0 ROM dump is here: 341-0246 ROM. The ROM is a 27C1024, not sure about the speed. The checksum is DC36.

The ROM text contents are scrambled a bit when viewed in a standard hex editor, but MiniPro displays it properly. Note the horizontal address layout is non-standard using 16-bit grouping with the correct endianness. The date is January 1991, note that the date is not written in the standard US format for some reason.

Unfortunately, it seems the ROM has been tainted with libertarianism, the phrase "Who is John Galt?" being a reference to the character John Galt in the novel Atlas Shrugged. The book is famous for being extremely long and boring and is one of the defining works of the anti-social libertarian ideology, which is best summarised as: "fuck you, got mine", or more verbosely: "I fear and distrust everyone around me." Many libertarians are familiar with age of consent laws in third world nations.

It was later made into a movie, and while planned as a trilogy it seems the producers ran out of others people money to spend, so only the first movie was actually made.

John Galt is most famous for delivering a speech exhaustively defining his ideology in the middle of the book. In plain ASCII format, this speech is 184 000 characters long, 60 standard pages, or about twice the length of the Communist Manifesto. This is also around 50% larger than the 1 Mbit ROM, so we can see why the author of the ROM decided to shorten it a bit.