[cctalk] Re: RS232 - parallel modems!?

Steve wrote: There was a company called Xircom that made parallel port modems. These were full modems that were small enough that they plugged into a laptop serial port, and got their power from the laptop via the external mouse/keyboard port. They had a feed-though connector so you could still connect and external mouse/keyboard if you wanted. The idea was portability, and not having to have extra cables (e.g., serial cable) to carry around. I think that these may have been available up to 2400 baud, maybe higher, but can't remember. This was at a time before laptops only had black and white LCD screens, floppy drive (no hard disk), and a parallel and serial port, and huge batteries that didn't run the machines for very long. I did use one of these Xircom modems on a Tandy Radio Shack Model 100 portable computer, and it worked well and did not seriously impact runtime on battery when it was being used. There was a special machine language program that you had to load that logically switched out the serial port to go through the parallel port as needed by the modem. I used on briefly on an old Toshiba Win95 laptop with a color display (don't remember the model), and it also worked well there. After laptops started having PCMCIA ports, Xircom made some modem cards in PCMCIA form-factor, and they had a little dongle that plugged into them that provided the RJ11 jack to plug the phone line into. I think these could go up to 14.4Kb, maybe more. I have at least one of the old Xircom parallel modems, and perhaps a couple of the Xircom PCMCIA modem cards in a box somewhere. Definitely devices that aged out fairly quickly as technology advanced and modems were built-into laptops for a while. Then modems, serial ports, floppy drives, optical media, and even parallel ports disappeared from laptops in favor of USB and WiFi, and even built in cellular Internet. Rick