Re: [TCLUG:224] RE: LUG - bash error and fat32

[Clayton Fandre <cfandre@cfsmo.honeywell.com>]

Christopher Reid Palmer wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 21 May 1998, Ben Kochie wrote:
> 
> > technical explanation:
> > "winmodem"s do not have a normal UART, they use a SOFTWARE UART that you can
> > only get for win95.. there IS a winmodem driver in progress, but the person
> > doing it may have decided to drop work on it.. on a P133, the driver takes up
> > 80% of the CPU, he tested it in win95, and it did the same in win95.. software
> > UARTs just don't work well
> 
> Let me parade my ignorance: what's a 'UART' ? TIA.
> 
> 

Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter. It's normally a hardware
chip that converts parallel information (ie your computer bus) into
serial information (your serial port), and back. All serial ports have
them.

If anyone ever wondered what the difference between the 16550A and 8250
UART serial ports are: The 8250 has a 38400 bps max and the 16550A runs
up to 115200 bps. With today's high speed modems (I use that term
loosely) make sure you have a 16550, since with compression, you can
potentially reach speeds > 38.4K.

The winmodem tried to cut the cost by eliminating the UART chip and
having the software do the work. Not a wise move. It takes too much CPU
time to do this. Hardware should be doing more work, not less.

Clay

-- 
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Clay Fandre            Honeywell - CAS-SPO / Coon Rapids, MN
System Administrator   cfandre@cfsmo.honeywell.com
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