CompuServe Messages

Jonathan, The Hayes ESP board goes inside your PC. It has 1K send and receive buffers. The board's coprocessor handles each character until the buffer is full. The board then DMA's the 1K into system memory. This relieves the x86 of something like 96% of its serial interrupts. It's intended to provide completely reliable high speed serial in multitasking environments (so called) like Windows and OS/2. It's said to perform much better than any 16550 UART and I don't doubt it. The cool thing is that it comes with Windows drivers and if you have an old DOS program that isn't even 16550-aware, you can run the program in a DOS session under Windows and get the full benefit of the board. Pretty nifty! I was thinking about buying a PC with only two slots and I would want one of them to be the Hayes ESP. Dunno what it costs though. Malcolm