"Smart" serial boards for the 80386

[Howard Leadmon]

In article <4935 at dasys1.UUCP>, manes at dasys1.UUCP (Steve Manes) writes:
> 
> I've had a lousy time trying to find a smart serial board for my 386.

 Well I know where you are comming from, I have been playing this game for
almost a year now, and about a week ago I got the solution I was looking for.

> I'm currently running a Digiboard COM/8 ("dumb") serial board but want to
> upgrade to an intelligent controller for the Trailblazer.  The Digiboard
> works with the T-bit, just not as smoothly as I would like.

 Yep, I have used quite a few Digiboard COM/8 cards, and for what they are 
they work very well..

> The first board tried was Bell's ICC's, which is a complete disaster.  If the
> modems aren't hung inside of 4 hours, the machine has crashed completely.

[Flame On!!]
 Well let me say that I can tell you some stories about Bell Technoliges, and
I wouldn't put it all here (it would overload the net!!). The Bell ICC is a 
peice of JUNK! It dosen't work with System V/AT, it works even worse with
System V/386 from Microport, and even with there own port of UNIX V 3.0 for
the 80386 (sold by Bell Tech) it won't handle a modem, so the board is
useless in my opinion. So I sent a whole pile of ICC's back to Bell and to
date have never received a refund (almost two months ago). I also own one
of Bell's 60meg tape backups, which I had to send back for repair, which 
has never been returned!! After many many calls to Bell (it took almost 
three weeks for them to return my call), when somebody called me back from
technical support they told me they had no idea of where my tape backup was,
and that I would just have to wait untill they got if repaired and shipped
it back to me. Well from all of this I can say I will be looking for another
supplier of Tape Backups, anybody have any good suggestions.
[Flame Off]

> The second was the Arnet.  This one appears to work fine... until you try
> to run one of a few programs (one of which is Magpie, which I wrote, so I
> know there's nothing tricky going on).  Xenix dumps with a panic if
> 'aspserv' (v 5.0) is loaded and then Magpie is run.  The error indicates
> possible kernel and/or RAM corruption.  We encountered similar problems
> with the Arnet and the 286 if the bus is pushed to 10 Mhz.

 Well I have no experience with the Arnet board, it didn't seem to have 
near the intelegence of several other products, so I didn't try it. The
good news is that I have found a SMART SERIAL BOARD that actually works
with MODEMS and TERMINALS. The board is the Smart Hostess from Comtrol,
and when I bought the board it had several bugs that needed to be taken
care of, so they put me in contact with the engineer that wrote the drivers
for the card. Both myself and Lori worked on and tested the board for 
several weeks, and at this point I can say the card performs almost flawless.
I am not sure if the drivers we have been working on have made it in
to the production line yet, but if you are interested in getting one of
the cards please give me a call and I will help make sure you get the
latest drivers. (this was such good news that I had to go get a drink :-)

> I suspect that the bus speed is the problem.  Does anyone know of a GOOD
> smart serial board, with hardware flow control, capable of keeping up with
> a 10 Mhz bus?

 Well the 10mhz speed could cause some problems, especially since the Bell
board uses the bus clock signals to drive the card. The Smart Hostess that
I mentioned above generates it's own clock. so it dosen't care about the 
bus clock speed, which is the way it should be..

Well that is about it, and I hope the information is useful to some of you
on the net, and I would avoid the Bell Technoliges ICC !!

P.S. - Steve, I am waiting to hear from you on your BBS software (looks good).


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