[HECnet] Which is THE dec printer?

Johnny Billquist bqt at softjar.se
Wed Jan 15 22:59:07 PST 2014


On 2014-01-15 22:29, John Wilson wrote:
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 18:52:08 -0500

The DHV11 has a pair of 8051s on it.   The DH11 is several boards full
of logic.   It has buffering and DMA capability to offload the host
system...it needs much less hand-holding than the DZ11.

For *output*.   They're all basically identical for input, and that's where
you'd actually need help (since you could lose data -- on output you just
might get behind).   Offloading input processing would need the mux to be
close personal friends with the TTY driver in each OS, so I see why it
didn't happen, but it would have been *much* more useful.

I partly beg to disagree. Any normal usage would typically see at least ten times as much output as input. Input essentially means a user hammering away at a keyboard.
Offloading output makes a *huge* difference.

But sure, if you could offload input as well, noone would complain. But yes, that has a lot of additional headaches, since OSes tends to want to handle some characters special...

	Johnny



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