Fast parallel driver for Unix/Xenix AT?
James O'Connor
jim at bahamut.fsc.com
Wed Dec 6 06:13:53 AEST 1989
In article <25747D15.4126 at ateng.com>, chip at ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>
> When printing to an HP LaserJet II or a Printronix 600, the printer most
> definitely is _not_ the bottleneck.
Sorry, no real help, just more info.
I was also getting very slow throughput on our HP LaserJet II. Then, due to
some hardware swapping, the LaserJet ended up connected to a parallel port
on a Hercules monochrome card, rather than a parallel port on a generic
ser/par I/O card. Lo and behold, the LJ just screams now.
My theory here is that some I/O cards are just not built to use the interrupts
like they're supposed to, and hence don't always work under Xenix.
My proposed solution is different from Chip's though. I don't want to see
new drivers for old boards, I'd like to see some bright, young engineer
come up with a new board. My wish list:
- multiple parallel ports on one board. you could use ribbon cable and the
openings on most AT cases to mount the jacks.
- use 16-bit IO so the port interrupts could be set to the higher numbers.
- emulate the standard PC parallel ports, or use a shared interrupt scheme and
let some bright, young software engineer write a device driver to take
advantage of it
Parallel ports are just so easy to use when connecting printers, it's a pity
that getting two or three of them in a machine uses up so many interrupts
and card slots.
-------------
James B. O'Connor Work: jim at tiamat.fsc.com
Filtration Sciences -- Play: jim at bahamut.fsc.com
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