v.cc2%UCLA-LOCUS@sri-unix.UUCP (12/08/83)
From: Computer Club SDC <v.cc2@UCLA-LOCUS> I am sorry to have to request this from you but I have no way to get out on to the net and ftp things. I would desperately like to have a copy of serial.asm. A comment on PC LAN's: Most of them are *very* similar. I have used 4 different ones (Orchid PC-NET, Xcomp X-net, 3Com Etherlink, and Davong Multilink) and except for the way they handle different quirky situations, they run much the same. The biggest problem with any LAN I have seen for the PC is that none of them seem to re-route printer things properly (read in hardware, not software). The are fine unless a program does something to do an output directly to a printer and not through DOS (as it turns out most things do). I will be very happy when IBM releases their card which handles this problem in hardware. The card should be announced officially in January. I have also made a discovery on the IBM assembler. It is the macro porition of the thing that is really slow. The code part is only slow. The stupid thing assembled my 4000 line program in just over 2 hours (yes hours). After I ran a macro preprocessor over the source, it took just over five minutes to assemble and the proprocessor run to another five minutes. - Howard