13 Nov
2019
13 Nov
'19
12:31 p.m.
On Wed, 13 Nov 2019, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
Are you sure that the parity stripping (for lack of a
better description) was
meant to translate things between modems? I would speculate that it was to
transition from serial communications which inherently depend on those
settings to TCP connections (raw / cooked / NVT / etc.) which inherently
don't use those settings.
Perhaps.
But, we thought that modems were FOREVER. We weren't thinking ahead to
communication other than POTS (Plain Old Telephone System).
"WOW! the new modems are 50% faster! They are close to the theoretical
maximum for copper wire!"
Parity, stop bits etc. were essential for error detection, ease of
parsing, and slow physical devices. A single bit error in a file
transfer could be disastrous. But, stuff like commands to the modem
didn't need much of that, and needed to be able to communicate in spite of
wrong parameters. It made sense for a modem to recognize a command, even
with wrong parity, etc.