"Smart" serial boards for the 80386

[John Owens]

In article <218 at turnkey.TCC.COM>, jack at turnkey.TCC.COM (Jack F. Vogel) writes:
> as well as the card worked overall ). This talk of the wrong sex connector
> makes no sense.  . . .
> it was for terminals, which means it is effectively
> a NULL MODEM. Now if someone tried to use this with a modem it certainly
> would not work!!! It was not the wrong "sex" however, it was male.

OK, you had a connector to which you could directly connect a terminal
with a straight-through cable, which is equivalent to a "normal" COM
port (male DTE) plus a null modem.  What's "wrong" is that this makes
the port DCE, which should have a female connector.  (To put this
another way, when flipping the pins (DCE vs DTE), you should also
change the sex of the connector.)

> What we
> did was make our own modem adapters so that the signals would be "straight
> through", and it worked fine as I said.

Sure; you changed it back to DTE.  But what you ended up with was a
null modem cable with opposite sex ends.

-- 
John Owens		SMART HOUSE Limited Partnership
john at jetson.UUCP	(old uucp) uunet!jetson!john
+1 301 249 6000		(internet) john%jetson.uucp at uunet.uu.net