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Post by Jeff Ledger on Feb 6, 2004 5:55:57 GMT -5
While 8bit TelBBSing is new, and we are all banging our heads against the wall to nail it all down, RS232 has been around long enough to have some interesting equiptment designed around it. One such device is call a Livingston Portmaster.
The Portmaster, (I own two of these gems) could be called a "Multiport Rs232 router" It has anywhere from 10-50 Rs232 connections on one side, with an Ethrenet connection on the other.
Early ISP's connected external modems tied to phone lines which in turn connected all incoming modem calls to the Ethernet connection, in a sense providing all dialup lines with a PPP/SLIP connection and giving them an IP address on the Ethernet.
These babies are extremely flexable, you can do things like dial in/dial out, sync multiple Rs232 connections for high speed, etc, etc. Perhaps we are closer to Ethernet connections for our 8bits than we thought.
Livingston was bought out by Lucent, who then dumped the entire product line, however there is still very good online support for the product and they are bought and sold in quantity on Ebay.
Perhaps it's time to dust mine off.
Jeff
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Post by Dr. Video/ADDiXiON on Feb 6, 2004 19:43:53 GMT -5
If it could eliminate the need to a PC/Linux box with routing software, I'd buy it. Ideally, I'd like a box that goes between the router and the C64/128 and works with existing BBS software. In otherwords, it combines a PC with the capabilities of something like Leif's software.
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