In praise of winmodems.

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>>>>> "Roeland" == Roeland Th Jansen <bengel@grobbebol.xs4all.nl> writes:

    >> In principle, a winmodem with Open-Source(tm) drivers should be
    >> better than most modems on the market, because we could fix it
    >> when there's a problem.  Yes, part of the driver would need to
    >> be OS-dependent.  Part of *every* portable Unix program needs
    >> to be OS-dependent.

    Roeland> i tend to disagree on this. winmodems would have too much
    Roeland> impact on the OS that runs the hardware. besides, what if
    Roeland> there are several of these things available ?  what if
    Roeland> they are not compatble in some degree ? that would cost a
    Roeland> lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of changes to
    Roeland> several parts.

How would you write a driver that could handle 8 of these things at
once running full 56KBPS with compression, or running fax on all 8 at
the same time?  I think it would swamp my poor little feeble 200 MHz
Pentium CPU, so that my web server, ftp server, SMTP server, telnet
sessions, and various application programs would not get a chance to
run very well.

Winmodems are for personal computers, where there is only a single
modem per computer, and only a single user per computer.  My computer
routinely handles a *MUCH* bigger workload that that!

-- 
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