larry@focsys.UUCP (Larry Williamson ) (02/26/88)
I'd like to share our experience with Connect Tech's Intellicon-8
smart card.
This is another of the many smart cards that are on the market
these days. One nice difference is that it works really well on
quite a number of different operating systems, including Xenix,
Microports V/AT 2.3, Quantums QNX, MS-DOS (PC-DOS) PC-MOS and
PC/ix. There are probably others, but these are the ones that I
know of.
We have been using the Intellicon-8 for about a month now on
microports V/AT 2.3. Prior to this I have used this same board
with Quantum's QNX operating system for about 6 months.
The xenix, qnx and dos drivers have been running for quite some
time now. They are solid, mature products.
Hardware is solid. There has never been any trouble with this
board from a hardware standpoint.
The software that I've been using for microport is beta version.
Connect tech is now releasing the production version of this
driver. Even though it has been a beta version, we have had very
little trouble with it. The first couple of versions were buggy,
but they are extremely helpful on the phone, and fixes were in my
hands within 2 or 3 working days worst case. The version we are
using now, has been up for about 1 week with NO hitches.
Unlike the experience someone on the net had with Digicom, Connect
Tech has been extremely helpful whenever I have had a problem.
We are using this board to connect 2 pc's and 1 AT to the
microport machine. All 3 machines are running at 9600 baud.
We've done quite a lot of file transfers, and even more full
screen editing with vi and microemacs. All work like a charm.
Our usenet feed is still connected to the dumb 2 port board in
this machine. The smart board will work in almost any combination
of their 2, 4 or 8 port smart cards with or without any dumb cards
present. The dumb card is used exclusively for the 2400 baud
usenet feed.
The software still has one bug relating to the use of uucp. It
does not work as of this writing. But they are working on this
bug. When they have this fixed, I'll remove the dumb card.
The 8 port board is capable of running at up to 19200 baud, but we
are running standard dumb ports in the pc's so we can only use
9600. the 4 and 2 port versions can run at up to 38400 baud. I
was told that you can set the baud rate even higher, but whether
the through put will be that high depends on your system.
Anyone considering buying a smart card for their PC or AT would do
well to consider this board.
If you want more info on this board, contact Connect Tech
directly. Their address and phone number are:
Connect Tech Inc.
340 Woodlawn Rd.
Guelph, Ontario.
N1H 7K6
Attn: Mike Powers.
1 519 836 1291
If it sounds like I'm praising this board a bit too much, it's
because I've used it a lot over the last few months with
absolutely no problems, and it really bugs me when I hear that
other people are being screwed around needlessly by these other
manufacturers. Their lives would have been so much simpler if
they had know about this board.
They have sales offices in quite a few countries, besides here
in north america, the far east (hong kong?), australia, europe,
and ??
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Larry Williamson Focus Automation Systems
UUCP: watmath!focsys!larry 608 Weber St. N, Waterloo, Ontario N2V 1K4
+1 519 746 4918