Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!killer!ninja!sys1!trsvax!johnm
From: johnm@trsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: hooking PC's together
Message-ID: <216100018@trsvax>
Date: 4 Mar 88 18:52:00 GMT
References: <3438@cup.portal.com>
Lines: 11
Nf-ID: #R:cup.portal.com:3438:trsvax:216100018:000:617
Nf-From: trsvax.UUCP!johnm    Mar  4 12:52:00 1988


I may be shooting myself in the foot by saying this, but...

I don't believe that there is any way to get the parallel port to signal you
with an interrupt when a character comes in.  This means that programs that
transferred data via the serial ports would have to continually poll the 
ports looking for new characters.  That would be much harder because suddenly
everything becomes time critical, "Wait!  We can't save that much data to
the disk because we have to keep polling too.  We'll have to save to the disk
a little at a time. etc."

If anyone can correct me on this then I would be glad to hear about it.