24 Mar
2007
24 Mar
'07
2:43 p.m.
On 3/11/07 10:41 AM, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
My recollection is very foggy as I never had a chance
to use one of
these things, but there were devices (inexpensive) to do this for use
with printers (at least in one direction) that would not only buffer
up data to be printed, but also do protocol conversions (parallel-to-
serial, serial-to-parallel). If someone had a very old Inmac catalog
from the 80's, I suspect you might find something there.
There were also devices for sharing terminals on a single port sold
by Inmac and several other companies.
Finding one of these devices themselves would be harder as I suspect
that most have long been discarded as peripheral "junk". In a snap,
almost any old PC with two serial ports could be programmed to do
the same thing.
Cheers,
Chuck
I picked up a few of these devices, unused in the box, with the Xerox Stars
I found recently. They are called the "PCS/2000 Networking Modem" by
Microcom. They are Z-80 based, have 2 independent RS-232 interfaces
allowing communication at different baud rates from 110 to 9600, and provide
Xon/Xoff flow control. Now I just need to convert the current loop on my
ASR-33 to RS-232 so I can try it out.
Richard Lynch