multiport serial board info needed

[Gary Lewin]

In article <1990Oct21.225209.583 at nstar.uucp> larry at nstar.uucp (Larry Snyder) writes:
>bruce at bmhalh.UUCP (Bruce M. Himebaugh) writes:
>
>>BEWARE OF MAXPEED!!!  The company I work for recently bought a 386 to be used
>>as an Accounting Computer.  We purchased SCO Unix as the operating system.  We
>
>I looked at maxspeed a couple of months ago - and at the time they
>didn't even support hardware flow control..

I have followed this conversation with some interest recently and finally
MUST respond.  

First, Maxpeed has a number of different cards with a series of available
drivers.  I have been installing these in systems running ISC 2.02 and 2.2
for a little over a year.  Both the series 1 and 2 work very well under
most, if not all applications.  Specifically, multiple cards work as 
described (4 cards with 24 ports are running in one system with some
terminals placed up to 400 feet away).  Transparent printing works
correctly (using Wyse 150's).  Multiple trailblazers on one card work well.
And, even though I have seen postings to the contrary, VP/ix works great
on the Maxpeed cards.  

The RTS/CTS problem is one that tends to plague many serial board
manufacturers.  Depending on which drivers are installed, Maxpeed does
support RTS/CTS but on a shared port basis.  In this configuration, ttyaa
and ab become one modem port and one 3 wire terminal port (in other words,
you do completely lose ttyab, just DCD and DTR, which become RTS/CTS for
ttyaa).

Most importantly, these cards install (series 2) in systems with 16 megs
of memory (many do not allow the drivers to be placed in high memory).

Lastly, I have found the people at Maxpeed to be wonderful to work with,
from technical support to sales.  They have always done what they said they
would do and have bent over backwards to accomodate the customer.  This is
VERY important and cannot be stressed enough.  

To top it off, the price is good and they rapidly honor warranty repair
even if it is not their fault (there are some lightning strike stories...).

SO, what really bothers me the most about these several Maxpeed postings
(including Conner's FAQ), is that after evaluating 4 other serial card
manufacturers, the Maxpeed is SUBSTANTIALLY better.  This is a separate
subject area, though.  Someday I will try to put together these various
tests into something coherent and post a "Serial Board- Watch Out" posting.

[ I have no affiliation with Maxpeed except to be a very satisfied customer.
The systems tested with this card include Compaq as well as others with a
variety of configurations:  4-16 Megs of memory, cacheing and non-cacheing,
transparent printing used daily in several different business environments,
up to 24 ports, all with VP/ix tested, up to 6 modems running on one card
simultaneously, etc. ]  

Gary Lewin
gary at mic.lonestar.org