Ben Cottrell drunkenly mumbled...
> Wonko,
> 
> I've never heard of the Carrera serial board--maybe it's super-fast-whizzy-
> cool and you should use it :-) But overall, my experience has been that

the Carrera is the 3004 CPU board used in most 3/1xx machines and the 3/75.
16.7Mhz m68020, m68881 FPU and 4M RAM on-board.

> Sun serial ports tend to be pretty wimpy--my first reaction would be to go
> for the PC, but maybe other people on this list have more experience with
> these things and will disagree :-) It's only a 28.8K modem, though...
> for computers that routinely deal with many megabytes per second, 3
> kilobytes per second is really not a big deal in any case.

hmm, it's my understanding that the whole reason the PC adopted the 16550 and
all 16xxx FIFO buffers for serial ports has something to do with the lousy
hardware design behind the architecture of the PC.  trying to make up for a
lousy design with a buffer.  but i also understand that the SUN serial ports 
(at least on the SPARCstations) don't go any higher than 38.4K, which at a rough
doubling of 28.8K for compression isn't fast enough to deal with the theoretical
57K you should be able to push through a 28.8K with compression.  that and the
fact that i just got the EPROM upgrade for the Supra to get 33.6K "real rate"
i just want the best speed i can get for my little network since i can't quite
afford ISDN right now.

> Faxing is pretty much OS-independent; just grab a package like hylafax
> and compile it.

this is what i want to hear!! :)

> Good luck! :-)
> 	~Ben

thanks!!  now all i need is to get NetBSD on at least one of the 3/180's.  i
have a lead on SMD disks for these things as well as other random VME cards.
with some luck i'll be able to find a couple 501-1132 4M VME cards.
anyone know if the Xylogics 472 tape controller will be able to deal with
a WangTek-5150ES 1/4" tape drive? it's either that or a TK50 which probably
won't work. (i have yet to ever get a TK50 to work on any non-DEC equipment)
will the Xylogics 472 handle the TK50? anyone know about an Adaptec-1542BF
for a PC?  at one point i'm going to have to write boot images on a TK50
for a VAXstation 2000 that is going to run NetBSD and don't have a machine
to write them with.

thanks,

-wonko