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At 11:11 AM -0600 1/22/00, Terry Wyss wrote:
>There are other manufacturers of serial interface cards that have
>buffering. I use a Multitech Intelligent Serial Interface model
>ISI551PC. It has 32k bytes of ram, has physical jumpers to set the
>IRQ's, is an ISA card, transmits at 115.2K bps, can be accessed by
>anything that would use a UART 16550. Mine has been reliable and is a
>couple years old. The ISI processor on the card [to quote the manual]
>"handles all of the byte-by-byte interrupts generated by the
>asychronous terminals and stores the data in buffers. The ISI then
>generates one interrupt for an entireblock of information and
>transfers the block to the system's microprocessor." There are faster
>cards with larger buffers, but they are probably overkill.
I found the information at
<http://www.multitech.com/products/FamilyHomePages/tn.asp?ID=24#more>
There appear to be two series of cards, the older 500 series cards mentioned above and a newer 600 series cards. The older series is ISA/EISA bus while the newer series has both ISA and PCI versions
600-Series Features
Four or eight buffered serial ports
Sustained data rates to 460.8K per port
Drivers for Windows 95/98/2000, Windows NT, Citrix, Novell,
SCO, Linux, and Multi-Tech RASExpress
PCI- and ISA-bus models available
256K RAM buffer
Model Description
ISI4604-PCI 4-Port Serial Card (PCI)
ISI4608-PCI 8-Port Serial Card (PCI)
ISI4608 8-Port Serial Card (ISA)
500-Series Features
One or two COM ports
Sustained data rates to 115.2K per port
Operating-system independent for flexible compatibility
ISA-bus
32K Bytes RAM buffer per port
Model Description
ISI552 Dual COM-Port Card (ISA)
ISI551 COM-Port Card (ISA)
A 32K byte buffer would store about 8 seconds worth of BMI 38.4K baud data which should certainly be sufficient for most purposes.
No prices and no on-line sales that I could see but they will refer you to dealers. Their phone number is 1-800-328-9717. The office is closed today.
Bob Fulks
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