Filtabyte

What Does Filtabyte Mean?

The Filtabyte was a network adapter card that was developed by LRT in the early 1990s. The card used direct memory access (DMA), a kind of bus mastering in limited form, which allowed for peripherals to write and read from memory without intervention from the processor. This freed up the processor to do other tasks.

Techopedia Explains Filtabyte

This Ethernet card was based on the AMD LANCE (Local Area Network Controller for Ethernet) AM7990 Ethernet Media Access Controller and has the same Serial Interface Adaptor chip as the driver. Filtabyte was capable of handling 10BASE-2 Type B, 10BASE-5 Type A and 10BASE-T. It used 24-bit address DMA or bus mastering and had 128 ring buffers and 48-byte transmission in FIFO configuration. The Ethernet address of a Filtabyte could be changed using software.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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