From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Mar 16 13:46:09 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id NAA28938 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 16 Mar 1995 13:46:09 -0800 Received: from cs.weber.edu (cs.weber.edu [137.190.16.16]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id NAA28931 for ; Thu, 16 Mar 1995 13:46:00 -0800 Received: by cs.weber.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1.1) id AA24742; Thu, 16 Mar 95 14:39:45 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Message-Id: <9503162139.AA24742@cs.weber.edu> Subject: Re: Multiport serial cards To: dufault@hda.com (Peter Dufault) Date: Thu, 16 Mar 95 14:39:44 MST Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com In-Reply-To: <199503161856.NAA04963@hda.com> from "Peter Dufault" at Mar 16, 95 01:56:37 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4dev PL52] Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > The Digiboard intelligent cards (about $1000.00 and no driver yet). > > I thought there were comments about Digiboard being uncooperative. I've > contacted them and the technical information is available on their > bulletin board and their dysfunctional www site. > > Any thoughts on: [ ... ] > 3. Scoop about Hayes and Digiboard. I have nothing but good to say about Digiboard; they were the first company with a finite state automaton to guarantee that transparent print requests comeing in on a seperate "printer" device did not cause a screw up in case the physical terminal with the printer port on it was in the middle of processing an escape sequence from the regular tty device. I believe they were also the first to have "multidrop" boards that actually worked (multiple serial ports multiplexed in a small fan out box on the end of an RS422 line, with a 422 board in the host running at some high rate of speed). Altos did this first, but they messed up by having a single input and output queue so that until a write was satisfied, you couldn't do a read. The ONLY thing that is standing in the way of a driver there, IMO, is the lack of someone with hardware and a determination to write a driver. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.