[aprssig] Laptops with true Serial Port

[Stephen H. Smith]

terrypalmer2 at compuserve.com wrote:
> Bob -
>
> Have no fear; no problems with the KEYSPAN USB to serial adapter.  In 
> fact, the come with a serial assistant utility that let's you reassign 
> the Com Port #.
>
> The Winlink Airmail program was finicky as I recall it only accepted 
> COM 1 - 4.  The above USB adapters are fine.      DO NOT USE BELKIN!!!
>
> cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aprssig

ben at ben.com wrote:
>
>
> I just got a new D620 as well.  There is a parallel port on the docking
> station, and I'm told that isn't a very expensive option at purchase time.
>   


Probably, neither of this solutions is viable for Bob since he is still 
trying to run DOS applications from DOS.  

USB devices simply don't exist at DOS since they are dependent on 
Windows-based drivers for their operation.  [Except for some removable 
USB mass storage devices like flash drives and ext HDDs that SOME modern 
motherboard BIOSes make appear as virtual hard drives to DOS.]

While there are drivers for PCMCIA serial ports (or at least used to 
be!) for DOS, the bulky multi-layer driver stacks often resulted in "RAM 
CRAM" problems in the limited DOS memory space of only1MB .  By the 
time, you loaded a mouse driver, and a two-layer CD-ROM driver, and the 
PC-Card manager and the actual PCcard serial port driver you had 
consumed too much RAM to allow the main app to run.




--

Stephen H. Smith    wa8lmf (at) aol.com
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