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Date:      Wed, 10 Mar 1999 14:45:18 -0500 (EST)
From:      Richard Cownie <tich@ma.ikos.com>
To:        freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
Subject:   PC WinModem (my last comment)
Message-ID:  <199903101945.OAA20584@lonesome.ma.ikos.com>

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Well, I guess I kicked open a can of worms here, let me just
answer the last two points and then I'll shut up and do some
real work.

Jack O'Neill wrote:

>Start a download and try to format a floppy at the same time.
>Unless they've done some rewriting of their code the download
>will fall apart even with a real modem.

.. which would mean that there are problems with Windows
floppy formatting, but that a WinModem is no worse than a
"real" modem in this respect.  

Chuck Robey wrote:

>And FreeBSD isn't very likely to support it at all, because it's an
>incredible waste of computing power.  You make it sound like being
>incredibly cheap is a virtue.  The simple minded thing just offloads all
>the signal processing of a modem onto your processor, which means it
>can't do anything else useful while the modem's going.  That isn't

I do believe that being incredibly cheap is a virtue.  If we can't
agree on that then we inhabit different worlds and don't have much
chance of agreeing on anything.  

As for the wastage of cpu cycles, my cpu doesn't have a meter that
charges me per instruction executed.  Most of the time it's doing
nothing.  According to the manual for my WinModem, it requires at
least a Pentium 75MHz - I have a Cyrix MII PR300, which is probably
at least 3 x faster than a Pentium 75MHz, so it's very likely that
the modem uses only 30% of the cpu even when going flat out (there
could be some context-switching effects, but this is a reasonable
guess).  Subjectively, the machine does not stop responding when
the modem is running - indeed it doesn't seem noticeably slower.

I believe that real people have put in a lot of hard work to make
WinModem's that do the job and can be bought for $15-20.  As an
engineer I would like us to give them due credit and not describe
their carefully-engineered products as "pieces of trash" without
prsenting any evidence for this view.

OK I'm done with this topic now.

Richard Cownie (tich@ma.ikos.com)


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