Driver for Stargate 0C8000 multiport; fas; mouse drivers

[Saul Lubkin]

About a month ago, I posted a note asking if anyone had a driver for ISC Unix
for the Stargate OC8000 multiport board, a dumb eight port serial board.  I
found that Stargate doesn't have one (they have drivers only for their
intelligent boards).  Here is a summary of what came up:

(1) SCO includes such a driver with SCO Unix (but, of course, designed for
the SCO product -- I don't know if it would work on other flavors of Unx 386)

(2)  The board came with a driver for SCO Xenix.

(3)  One netlander, Eric Schnoebelen from Iowa (Model) Railroad, in Dallas, noted that the fas asynchronous driver, a substitute for the "asy" that comes with
Unix Sys V/386, comes with a generic driver for most dumb serial multiport
asynch cards.  I downloaded fas2.06 from an archive -- and to my surprize,
everything worked perfectly.  I noticed a significant improvement in modem
performance -- even though my modem was a mere Hayes compatible 2400 Baud
clone, and my UART are standard AT types.

I had no difficulty editing the "space.c" of fas, to accomodate my eight port
board (which I put on interrupt 2/9), and my old parallel serial card (which
continued to control "COM1" and "COM2", with their usual interrupts and
addresses.  My ASCII terminal was put on one of the ports on the new board.

However, I discovered that fas2.06 doesn't support VP/ix.  So my serial ports
were not accessible under VP/ix.  Also, VP/ix wouldn't ruerlyon the
ASCII terminal.  So, I set things up so that some ports were controlled
by fas, some by the old asy.

Then fas2.07 came out, which supports VP/ix.  I switched all my ports to
being controlled by fas2.07, and VP/ix worked perfectly from the serial
terminal; and DOS under VP/ix tasks were able to access the mouse and other
serial devices.

One problem:  My Logitech serial three button mouse was not correctly
recognized by ISC X windows v1.2.  The console would hang when I tried to
start X.  (This had not happened with release 2.06 of fas.)  I found
(with the help of Uwe Doering, who maintains fas) that telling X that
my mouse was a Mouse Systems mouse, solved the problem.
Now, all of my serial ports are controlled by fas2.07, asy is no longer
in my kernel, and everything works perfectly -- including "COM1MOUSE", which
allows you to run X in one VT with your mouse, and also use the mouse with
DOS applications using VP/ix in other VT's.  And my modem communications
are significantly faster with fas than asy; and there is also some improvement
on my ASCII serially connected terminal.

My thanks to Eric Schnoebelen for recommending fas, and to Uwe Doering for
making it available and maintaining it; and for being so prompt with a 
response about the ISC Logitech mouse problem on r1.2 of X.