Substitute for original Airport card

I have a DVD Special iMac with a dead ethernet port. I had been using it with a USB ethernet adapter. Going through the junk in the closet, I found the Airport adapter card that came with the Airport card for my iBook and the old graphite base station that went with it. Since Apple dropped support of the graphite base station with OS X Tiger, it went in the closet and a new Netgear WiFi router went into service. It happens that the guts of a graphite base station is a Lucent WaveLan Silver PCMCIA card. I got to wondering if the WaveLan card would work in the iMac adapter. The WaveLan card is longer than an Airport card since it has an antenna built in, but a bit of snipping with a wire cutter removed part of the plastic bracket on the adapter which was in the way. There's an antenna jack under a tiny plug on the card, and lo! the iMac's antenna plug fits it. I plugged it all together and plugged the iMac back in to the wall.
It works. No extra drivers or anything. OS 9.2.2 works. OS 10.4.11 works. Apple System Profile sees it as an Airport card. The old graphite airport base stations are cheap (there's a big pile of them at our Goodwill store for $15 each). You do need the adapter, which is also usually cheap because people who bought Airport cards for their iBooks didn't need the adapter.
I figured the WaveLan card might work in OS9 because they were supported on Lombard and Pismo PowerBooks, but unlike the PowerBooks, it also works in OS X without a 3rd party driver.

John, Welcome to the discussion area!
The second choice would be an Ethernet wireless adapter. These devices require no drivers and therefore will work with any Ethernet device.

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