Serial interfaces (was Re: Any former Psion 5 owners out there?)

[Tony Duell]

> Hi Tony,
> I'm sort of surprised to hear you say that RS232 ports on a PCI card are 
> OK with you.  Maybe it's because I'm primarily a software guy, but for 

Well, I'll admit I've never used them, I don't own a machine with a PCI 
bus (and electornically, I regard PCI as a right royal kludge!).

But I'd assumed you got somerthing that looked like a 8250 (or a 16550 or 
similar) at a particualr base address, and you could just access the I/O 
registers as usual. Is that not the case?

> some purposes I loathe RS232 ports on PCI cards almost as much as I do 
> USB.  I think my loathing of both technologies is much the same as 
> yours, in that in some cases they both make it more difficult for me to 
> do precisely what I wish to do.  Just as one example, I have some legacy 
> DOS-based software containing its own UART driver.  I don't even want to 
> think about trying to make that work on a PCI card RS232 port.

What is the great problem with doing this?

> 
> BTW, I don't mean to imply that I unconditionally loathe these two bits 
> of technology - just when they get in my way.  At other times, I greatly 

I hate any technology that gets in my way, or which makes my life harder. 
Unfortuantely, it apprars that the old joke 'user friendly == hacker 
hostile' is all too tru, and that an awful lot of modern stuff may well 
be user friendly in that it's easy to get it to do what the 
manfuacturers intend, but it sure isn't easy to get it to do what I want..

Having seen bits of PCI card design, I am glad I design cards for my 
classics with ISA, Unibus, DIO-1, etc buses. Those I can understand and 
wire up a card for any one of them in a couple of hours...

-tony