Serial port speed

Bruce Allen ballen at csd4.csd.uwm.edu
Wed Jul 18 00:38:14 AEST 1990


>What is the maximum speed at which one can use the serial port on a Sun
>(particularly the 4/65 if that matters)?  We have heard 19.2 Kbaud and
>38.4 Kbaud --- both from Sun people --- and would like to know what has
>actually been done successfully.  (We would actually like much higher
>speeds, but...

I looked into this about a year ago for my 4/60.  I noticed that my
printer (Apple LaserWriter IINTX) was rather slow at printing 1 Mbyte
postscript files.  It took about 15 minutes.  After a bit of
head-scratching, I realized that this was almost entirely due to the slow
9600 baud serial link.  I reset the printer baud rate to 38,400 baud and
set port a to run at the same speed, and sure enough I can now print the
same file in four minutes.

When I told some people at Sun that this was possible, I got several
suprised messages.  Apparently no one had tried to do it...

The printer will go up to 56Kbaud, so if one can run the port even faster,
I would like to know about it.

				Bruce Allen



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