🚀 go-pugleaf

roy@sendai.cybrspc.mn.org (Roy M. Silvernail) writes:

>>> It has nothing to do with software.  Modems are by design serial devices,
>>> and cannot be used on parallel ports. 
>> 
>> WRONG! Today I read in PC-Magazine (from January.1994) a small article abou
>> a new modem that makes V-FAST and can be connected to the parallel port.I
> 
> It only makes sense to run it parallel at those high speeds.  Have any
> of these companies done a parallel FOSSIL driver?  That would be the way
> to go, I think.

I guess they are doing different, don't believe they are going to mess
with FOSSIL. They will probably provide a virtual Windows driver. Running
Win in enhanced mode, the driver could remap the the paraller port to a
standard comm port. This is how most paraller devices work, like the sound
ports and others. Of course, you would need to run software like Waffle in
a DOS box under Windows (or OS/2 or NT).

They also probably assume, that most software will add a paraller driver.
That would require enabling the IRQ on the printer port, which may end
adding more problems than solving ones.

I wonder why nobody designed a non-serial internal modem interface, that
still looks like an 8250 (or 16550A) UART to the cpu. In internal modems,
the cpu talks by parallel to the UART, which serializes the data only for
deserializing it again _inside_ the modem, a definitive waste! With today
technology it should be extremelly easy to design a chip with uart registers
and a parallel output. Not only it would be faster, but it would eliminate
overrun errors because the chip could do flow control automatically.

	Jorge