Jared writes:

>  I know that the serial port does work, I both run a modem and a printer at
>times off of it.

Uh, It's been a while since I saw the back of a 5000/25, but arent there
_two_ serial ports?  (at least, the Zilog chip itself supports two channels.)


>I know that Ultrix up to (I think this is the last release)
>4.5 didn't support the ethernet, and I'm fairly sure that I've heard through
>the grape vine that the hardware is not even all there.

Ethernet? Do you mean ISDN?

The audio chip used is the same as in Sparcstation 1s and 2s.  IIRC,
the ISDN port was taped over for legal reasons, because DEC never got
the hardware type-approved by the Australian PTT.  If someone ever
fudged up the IOCTL asic dma support (e.g., a proper <bus.h>), and
added <bus.h> support to the amd53c79 driver in, e.g., the sparc port,
then the BSD audio driver might Just Work.

Random factoid: here was some kind of supported sync-serial driver for
the ISDN port in the wide-area networking software kit (X.25 usw).
I don't know if that software did ISDN signalling or not.

Re use as a modem:  The short answer is `no'.

Supposedly, there isn't enough hardware in the Personal DECstation to
detect an analog RING signal and pick up a phone.  One needs the TC
LoFi board for that.  And doing the requisite A/D and D/A sampling
(DSP) fast enough to use the audio port as a modem, using only a 25MHz
r3000A would be, uh, challenging. (PPC Macs and NeXTs implement(ed)
modems this way, but using either a dedicated DSP chip or PPC cycles.)