Intelligent serial cards for Sys V/AT

[Phil Trubey]

I have used the Digiboard intelligent card (com 8/i) with Microport 2.2.2U.
In a nutshell, I was not impressed.  The card came with linkable device
drivers that you could configure to use whatever interrupt and memory
address space you wanted.  The driver, however, had bugs.  It would not
operate reliably at 9600 baud.  After some informal tests, I actually
found that the dumb board had better throughput than the smart board!
This was at 2400 baud speeds, running several ports simultaneously.

Also, just getting the proper driver from Digiboard was not easy.  Twice
they sent me drivers for SCO Xenix, and when they finally sent me one
for Microport, it was an older, buggy version.  The newer one wasn't
much better, though.

After much fooling around, we decided to junk the intelligent board and
get their dumb board.  It works.

Note that this experience happened about 4 months ago, and was with
Microport 2.2.2U.

Hope this helps,

Phil Trubey
School of Computer Science, Carleton University

CDNnet: 	ptrubey at sce.carleton.cdn
BITNET: 	ptrubey at carleton
UUCP: 		ptrubey at sce  (..!watmath!clan!ptrubey  or !watmath!sce!ptrubey)