Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!alberta!calgary!xenlink!blender!root
From: root@blender.UUCP (Herb Peyerl)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: async expansion boards
Summary: Dickens/computone and 10 pin connectors.
Message-ID: <80@blender.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jul 89 06:56:08 GMT
References: <330@yetti.UUCP>
Organization: Some apartment in downtown Calgary
Lines: 45


The company I used to work for had a few RT's running the Dicken's
8 and 16 port boards... They worked ok for what they were supposed
to do.  I never could get them to run serial printers with DTR 
flow control. Xon/Xoff only was my experience (although IBM has
proven to me that this is also impossible with THEIR 4 and 8 port
boards.  Someday I'm hoping for a documentation change on this.).
For running terminals and modems however they're great. The wiring
is certainly easy.  I've tried in vain to get a Computone Intelliport
AT8 working in an RT and it was a no go situation.  I also tried
the reverse (Dickens in an AT) which was also a No-Go.  The boards
to my untrained eye looked identical and the only difference I could
see was in the board's bios.  I didn't bother trying to switch the
prom's on the board to verify this.  I've gotten support from the
dickens people on a problem we had with the 16 port board.  The
support in my opinion was mediocre.  We played telephone tag for
about 4 days (conveniently the tech person there always happened
to call at lunchtime.  To cut down on their long distance bills
perhaps? Whenever I returned his call he was always on the phone.)
Once we got in touch he gave me a list of things to try which I'd
guessed wouldn't work.  I tried them just to be consistent. They
didn't work.  He shipped me new drivers.  No change.  Eventually
we switched the customer over to dual IBM 8-port boards.  The
problem we had (and this was only on ONE site) was the board would
switch the IBM-3151 terminal into graphics mode which we couldn't
disable on the terminal.  Shutting down the machine didn't help.
Only solution was to delete the physical device and recreate it. 
After that everything was ok.  Anywyays, the boards worked well.
The price was mediocre.  The support was not great but wasn't 
needed very often.

  On another note: Those funny plugs that you refer to are 
available from Amphenol (sorry, no part number. Don't work
there anymore).  Our cost on them was CDN$12.90 ea.  The
cable diagram is in the orange planning guide that you should
have kicking around.  It was costing us about $23 (cdn) to 
make a single cable counting $4 labor each.


   Hope this helps you out.

-- 
UUCP: herb@blender.UUCP   ||  ...calgary!xenlink!blender!{herb||root}
ICBM: 51 03 N / 114 05 W
'Objects in mirror are larger than they appear'