[conspire] DE-9, not DB-9 (was: conspire list hacked?)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Texx (texxgadget at gmail.com):

> The original serial interface was designed for terminals and modems.
> The RS-232 standard actually has TWO data channels in it, the second being
> a much slower interface.
> This secong channel was designed for controling the modem and the dialer.
> The "ATDT" command set allowed "in band signalling" and this removed the
> need for the second data channel.
> The "Xon-Xoff" protocol removed the need for hardware handshaking.

As a former BBS sysop / owner / constructor, I strongly disagree.
Xon/Xoff was a totally inadequate substitute for the hardware-level 
RTS/CTS (ready to send, clear to send) signaling, and everyone who truly
cared about fast and reliable communication made sure to have hardware
handshaking present and working.  By comparison, Xon/Xoff was crap, at
best a second-choice and much-less-reliable fallback if you have shoddy
hardware that won't do hardware handshaking.

ISTR that my BBS box's serial port was locked to 38,400 bps, for
communication to the lovely external US Robotics Courier
Dual-Standard[1] modem driving the line, and the line discipline was
under the control of the BNU FOSSIL driver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSSIL This ensured that the buffers to
and from the modem were never starved even if the data-stream was highly
compressible, and the hardware handshaking ensured that traffic was
managed with precision worthy of a Hohenzollern military parade.

Mind you, the bps over the telco line was at that time able to go only
up to 9600 bps before the effect of compression.  I shut down The
Skeptic's Board BBS around 1993 because I saw no future in the
small-time thinking and DOSisms built into Fidotech and related BBS
standards, and wanted to get away from that.  If I'd upgraded my Courier
Dual Standard to V.90 (56 kbps) instead of giving it away, I'd certainly
have locked the serial port to 115,200 bps rather than 38,400.  (I don't 
know if any RS-232C ports supported 224,000 BPS, and no longer care.)

I still have a nice little V.90 US Robotics Sportster (that someone gave
me) gathering dust in the hardware cabinet, and consider it very
unlikely to be ever useful again, but, hey, you never know.  External
modem, of course, because internal modems _still_ suck.  ;->



> What we got from USB, was the ability to use the same protocol for
> keyboard, mouse, serial, external drives, and in some cases audio & video.

On balance, I think it's been an improvement, because those other
low-speed buses just weren't very good -- and you no longer have to
worry about motherboard circutry blowing out just because some moron
decides to unplug a PS/2 keyboard when system power's running.

OTOH, we have ongoing security amusements when tinkerers show off at
Blackhat Conference yet another USB device designed to lie to the host
computer, and the IT press all pretend as if that were new and
unexpected, while everyone who's read even the _first thing_ about 
USB says in unison 'Yes, we know, already.  Sheesh.'


[1] 'Dual-Standard' meant the modem could also do USR's proprietary HST 
protocol across the telco line, which was faster than ITU standards like
V.34.  If you were handling echomail between BBSes, you really needed
the ability to do HST and not just ITU standards like V.32.