john@jwt.UUCP (John Temples) (08/26/90)
In article <3687@rsiatl.UUCP> jgd@rsiatl.UUCP (John G. DeArmond) writes: >Hmm, seems to me that if ISC would just [...] >concentrate their efforts (and our money) on >things like fixing the ASY drivers and [...] >make the floppy driver catch more than one >sector per revolution and so on and so forth, we'd all be lightyears ahead. Does ISC *still* not have a working asy driver or usable floppy driver? I was using ISC 1.0.6, and found the asy drivers completely broken (especially for dial in/dial out on the same line), and the floppy drivers absurdly slow. I have seen people continue to complain on the net about how they can't get bidirectional modem access working, even on later versions of ISC. I recently bough ESIX, and the asy drivers work perfectly. They are 100% solid, work with bidirectional modem access "right out of the box" without using the uugetty kludge, and support the 16550. The floppy drivers are not quite as fast as DOS, but are dramatically improved over the ISC drivers I have experience with. I paid $618 for an unlimited user ESIX development system. The most recent price I saw for a 1-2 user ISC 2.2 system was $1,895. Granted, the ISC package has NFS, VP/ix, and a couple other things, rather than the unlimited user license. But how can they justify such prices if even the most fundamental drivers are broken? And not to mention the difference in support costs: $600/year for ISC versus $0/year for ESIX. I'd much rather have fewer features that work well than lots of features that don't work at all. -- John W. Temples -- john@jwt.UUCP (uunet!jwt!john)
johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine) (08/26/90)
In article <2050@jwt.UUCP> you write: >Does ISC *still* not have a working asy driver or usable floppy driver? ISC finally cleaned up the asy driver in the X5 update to 386/ix 2.0.x. The throughput is OK, particularly if you have a 16550 FIFO serial chip. It has separate /dev/ttyN and /dev/acuN special files so that dialing in and out on the same line is locked in the kernel without having to fool around with uugetty. I have an internal Telebit modem that I upgraded to a 16550 and get respectable uucp throughput above 1100 cps. The 2.2 floppy driver isn't superb but it is at least reasonable. Disk throughput under vp/ix is great, it apparently reads and writes full tracks on the raw disk. The driver also makes a respectable try at determining the density of a disk when you open it. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!esegue!johnl
larry@nstar.uucp (Larry Snyder) (08/27/90)
john@jwt.UUCP (John Temples) writes: >I recently bough ESIX, and the asy drivers work perfectly. They are >100% solid, work with bidirectional modem access "right out of the >box" without using the uugetty kludge, and support the 16550. The Do the ESIX ASY drivers fully support hardware only flow control? -- Larry Snyder, Northern Star Communications, Notre Dame, IN USA uucp: iuvax!ndmath!nstar!larry -or- larry@nstar Public Access Unix Site (219) 289-0282 (5 lines/PEP/HST/Hayes-V)