Serial Boards

[Jack F. Vogel]

In article <139 at wobble.UUCP> dlu at wobble.UUCP (Doug Urner) writes:
>I'm trying to select a multi-port serial card for my '386 machine.
>One of the board's major responsibilities will be to handle uucp
>trafic through a high speed modem I am assuming that it will have
>to be a "smart" board.
>
>I have more or less narrowed my search to these three boards, but I
>am open to other ideas.
>
>    Anvil "Stallion" 8 port
>
>        They claim to have implemented the tty driver on the board
>	so that all serial i/o can be off loaded to the board.  This
>	might be great but it also makes me a little nervous about
>	the amount of finger pointing that could get involved with
>	keeping the drivers in sync.  I also assume that I will have
>	to keep two drivers around if I want any other serial boards
>	on the system.
 
I have put in a number of different "smart" and "dumb" multiport cards
for different clients and I will have to say that I never have seen a
card as nice as the Anvil Stallion. It uses its own drivers but they
install like a breeze. It really does offload most serial I/O from the
CPU. Also going from 8 ports to 16 ports is just a daughter board and
additional cable. If I remember correctly it has a 10Mhz 80186 and
64K of static ram onboard. So far my client using it only has 8 ports
but the distributor up north claims to be easily supporting 32 ports
on a 20Mhz 386. They also provide a nice monitor program that shows
you the amount of data transmitted or received through each of the
ports and percentage of CPU utilization in real time. This card is a
real winner!!

>    Arnet "Smartport" 8 port
>
>	This one did real well in "Infoworld's" benchmarks.  They also
>	offer a "lifetime" (of the machine (or company, whichever comes
>	first :-)) warranty.  Interactive supports this board.

Arnet is a good solid board but watch out because some of their boards,
and I believe this includes the one above do not provide modem support
signals, they are only capable of running terminals, that also means
you will not have full handshaking with the terminal either which may
mean it will be problematic to run above 9600 baud. On the Anvil we
run terminals with full handshaking at 38.4K baud.


-- 
Jack F. Vogel
Turnkey Computer Consultants, Costa Mesa, CA
UUCP: ...{nosc|uunet}!turnkey!jack 
Internet: jack at turnkey.TCC.COM