info about kits

[Bill Carpenter]

On 12 Apr 90 16:09:06 GMT, botton at i88.isc.com (Brian D. Botton) said:

botton>   Sorry netlanders, all I'm willing to say is I want to make
botton> an expansion board so bad that it hurts, almost, ;-).  Most
botton> people aren't using any of their 3 slots and I figured there
botton> should be something out there that will fill the void.  All I
botton> have to do now is find something that is relatively easy to
botton> do, won't cost a fortune, and isn't already being done.  When
botton> I'm ready, I'll let you know.

Brian probably has more than enough ideas and is just trying to
whittle them down, but in case anyone else has a hot, steaming
soldering iron, here's my idea for something relatively simple but
potentially quite useful.  I am too dangerous when it comes to
hardware to get even this simple thing created on my own.

What about a way to transfer stuff bidirectionally at high speeds to
and from a PC clone?  I know some time ago there was talk about
building some kind of bus converter so that one could use PC cards
somehow with the UNIXpc.  I don't recall whether that turned out to be
impossible or just impractical.

What I have in mind, though, is something closer to the flavor of a
truly birdirectional serial port that could operate at a fairly good
clip (perhaps with DMA or its own buffering or something).  The idea
is that you run a cable from this thing to an equivalent bidirectional
thingy on the two-dollar PC clone sitting on the next orange crate.
Besides the device driver on the UNIXpc, you also need some small
amount of software on the clone side.  Certainly, you're not going to
pretend that it's Ethernet, but it does give you software-assisted
access to the PC clone bus.

Given all that, figuring in the price and availability of low to
medium power clones, and marvelling at all their peripherals and
expansion cards, does it make sense (and is it do-able) to treat the
clone as an intelligent peripheral controller?
--
   Bill Carpenter         att!ho5cad!wjc  or  attmail!bill