CompuServe Messages

John, Sure, everybody has _a_ serial port, with emphasis on the singular 'a'. But serial ports are slow. Sure, we on Amiga's can do midi speeds on the serial port, but we are the exception. ibm's have a tough time doing 9600 bps on the 8088 machines. Most hardware devices build their serial ports to work with the lowest common denominator, 8088 machines. Even Tektronix does it – they limit the speed out the serial ports of their oscilliscopes to 9600 (or was it 4800) bps. Getting back to the singular serial port point – Sure everybody has a serial port. But you don't see people making hard disks run on the serial port, now, do you? SCSI would be the next step up from a serial port. It is much faster, and almost any machine can have a SCSI port now. The only problem is you easily share the CD drive with more than one machine, or if you wanted more than one drive, you require another SCSI unit number, of which there are very few to start with. Now if you go Ethernet (thin of course), you still have high speed, you can share the unit with more than one computer, you can easily have more than one CD-drive available, so you could have more than one CD online, giving you more than one subject area available right now. It is becoming very cheap to add Ethernet boards to most computers now, at least Amigas and clones, dunno about Macs. With the availability of Ethernet addons for the Amiga (and clones), what I see happening in a home is have one Amiga, at least an Amiga 2000, which would have it's own hard drive, maybe a second larger hard drive (ideally would be a r/w optical drive), a multiport serial board with a couple of printers, maybe a modem, and a fax unit, and the Ethernet board. Now when it came time to adding another computer in the household, say for the kids, spouse in his/her favorite work nook in the house, what ever, you could do this by getting an Amiga 500 with a slap on Ethernet unit, some internal ram expansion (bring the machine up to 3 megs of ram), plug into the Ethernet, [ MORE ]