MNP levels

[Inge Arnesen]

In article <62 at comix.UUCP> you write:
>In article <59 at marilyn.UUCP> shawn at marilyn.UUCP (Shawn P. Stanley) writes:
>>In article <3477 at crash.cts.com> jca at pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) writes:
>>>Are there any MNP (level 5) MNP emulation packages for Unix/Xenix? 
>>
>>I'd be interested too, if there are sources involved!
>
>As far as I know MNP is a proprietary >hardware< protocol that
>is owned by Microcomm which is the M in MNP. . .; Microcomm
>licenses this technology to other OEM's however.

Yes and no. MNP level 1-2 is now in the public domain and MicroComm
has release emulation source for IBM PC. A few hackers have made
MNP lookalikes (which usually are even less compatible than the many
lisenced ones :-). Still, the original MNP levels 3-10 are still
property of MicroComm....

BTW: MNP is not a hardware protocol. Even if it usually runs inside a
modem, it is still an implementation of an algorithm.... and MNP is
as far as I know a SW implementation (written in C ?). If some
modem companies will put it in micro code you might be right in
calling it a hardware implementation, but not a hardware protocol
as such. I don't believe there is any hard wired MNP implementations
around (correct me if I'm wrong).

I have thought about making a MNP driver for XENIX, but after getting
MNP on my modem and finding out how useless it is (level 3), I
abandoned the idea. Even level 5 is not very interresting for news
transfers, since the news files are sent compressed and UUCP is a
pretty good protocol .....

I've found that on good lines, MNP levels or V.42bis only makes the transfers
of compressed files slower.



Inge (BoB)  { ingea at ifi.uio.no }
=========================================================================
==   Inge Arnesen, University of Oslo, Norway.                         ==
==                                                                     ==