Fast parallel driver for Unix/Xenix AT?

[James O'Connor]

In article <25747D15.4126 at ateng.com>, chip at ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
> 
> When printing to an HP LaserJet II or a Printronix 600, the printer most
> definitely is _not_ the bottleneck.

Sorry, no real help, just more info.

I was also getting very slow throughput on our HP LaserJet II.  Then, due to
some hardware swapping, the LaserJet ended up connected to a parallel port
on a Hercules monochrome card, rather than a parallel port on a generic
ser/par I/O card.  Lo and behold, the LJ just screams now.

My theory here is that some I/O cards are just not built to use the interrupts
like they're supposed to, and hence don't always work under Xenix.

My proposed solution is different from Chip's though.  I don't want to see
new drivers for old boards, I'd like to see some bright, young engineer
come up with a new board.  My wish list:

- multiple parallel ports on one board.  you could use ribbon cable and the
  openings on most AT cases to mount the jacks.

- use 16-bit IO so the port interrupts could be set to the higher numbers.

- emulate the standard PC parallel ports, or use a shared interrupt scheme and
  let some bright, young software engineer write a device driver to take
  advantage of it

Parallel ports are just so easy to use when connecting printers, it's a pity
that getting two or three of them in a machine uses up so many interrupts
and card slots.
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