Beware the Telebit T18pc

[Dick Dunn]

seg at ingres.com (scott e garfinkle) writes:
> In case you were considering the t18pc, think about this.  I bought one and
> discovered after much wasted efort that the (soldered-on) 8250 UART was
> keeping my throughput at around 70 cps.  The only solution was to replace
> it with another UART (I chose the 16550, of course).  Well, after a year,
> it started developing strange problems with responding to AT commands.
> Seems possible that a trace was damaged...

I've been down the first part of this road--unacceptable performance and
lost characters with a trailblazer plus PC, so I replaced the UART with a
16550.  What a &^%$#!! monstrous pain--I took it very carefully and spent
about 45 minutes replacing one chip (with a socket--I did learn a little
something along the way!).  It works fine now, but it annoys me no end that
Telebit makes such fast modems with an obviously-crippled part like the
8250.

If they're going to use the 8250 for cost reasons, the least they could do
is socket the damnfool thing.  Have people tried beating up on Telebit
about this?  It's not as if it's a new problem!

> Also, in case you were wondering, the T18PC is not upgradeable to V.32
> capability.

That's another major nuisance.  When Telebit was relatively alone, PEP was
OK 'cause if you were talking to another machine that had a high-speed
modem, there was a good chance it was another Telebit.  Supposedly, the
design of the Telebit modems allowed them to be upgraded to support newer
protocols, yet here we see the most significant need for an upgrade and
they can't/won't (which is it, BTW?) provide an upgrade.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd at ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools.