On Wed, Dec 10, 2025 at 10:03:04AM -0500, James Knott via Talk wrote:
My point is this sort of thing might not be as easy as some think. I remember the days of Winmodems, where you needed Windows to load the drivers into the dumb modem card. I don't know how clearly defined the boundary is, between what's built into the hardware and what might come with the OS.
Winmodems usually ran the modulation and demodulation in software. The modem was just a sound card with a telephone line interface. That made them cheap. The expectation was that pentiums were so fast and over powered that wasting cpu cycles on the modem was perfectly fine. There might have been some that just wanted to same rom costs and used ram that was loaded by a driver, but I don't recall seeing any that did it that way. -- Len Sorensen