jl@french.UUCP (Jean-Louis Ecochard) (05/03/88)
I am taking the bus in the middle of the trip, so pardon if I bring up an already discussed topic. I use a Fastcomm 2496 Turbo, one of the first affordable 9600/19200 bps asynchronous modem. It was rough at the beginning and I lost my temper more than once over this / CENSORED / modem that would not work with getty the way I wanted. But I lived it through, and it finally worked. I received FREE firmware upgrades without asking for them or sending the "little white card that I misplaced somewhere" ( I know, I could not believe it myself ). The command language is a superset of the now standard AT command set. It allows you to control the RS232C interface leads as well as XON/XOFF flow control and more. It even has a remote command mode that you can use to configure a remote modem ( I more than one enjoyed this feature ). As most of the high speed modems it is compatible with itself only at speeds above 2400 bps ( although I heard from Fastcomm the three letters MNP associated with the verb "to look into" ). I never had the opportunity to benchmark it at high speed. I just did some tests with CA ( the far west ) to see how it would behave over long distance. ( The performances are degrading when you get on a satellite line ). I would like to test UUCP transfer at high speed in order to provide a solid Unix based benchmark to the growing community of 9600++ 8-) modem users. Fastcomm has modified their high speed protocol to provide better throughput while using Xmodem. They are planing on doing the same for Ymodem, Kermit and Uucp. If you would like to work on the benchmark, contact me via email. I will publish the results ( if any ).