On 2020-05-07 4:09 p.m., Alvin Starr via talk wrote:

The headers and cables tended to be pretty standard.

Thanks, Alvin. TIL I learned that they're actually not. Well, there's one standard, and there's the thing that ASUS uses. Guess who bought a "standard" cable but has an ASUS motherboard? The "standard" way assumes an IDC 10-way header on the motherboard and an IDC 9-pin RS-232 connector on the other end. Because of the difference in pin ordering, a straight-through ribbon cable ends up mapping header pins 1-9 to 1, 6, 2, 7, 3, 8, 4, 9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 You can see the pinout for this on a weird little embedded 386SX clone I have (ZF MicroSystems OEMmodule): https://archive.org/details/zf_systemcard_technical/page/10/mode/2up ASUS, bless 'em, decided that they should be different and mapping header pins 1-9 to RS-232 connector pins 1-9. More logical, maybe, but it means you can never use IDC 9-pin connectors with an ASUS board. I've rewired it and all is well.

There are a number of programs for managing serial ports but I have had reasonably good luck with minicom.

minicom's usually my go-to program too. One of my devices insists on talking 7M1, and minicom can't set that as a default. I had to compile the venerable C-Kermit for out-the-box mark parity support. C-Kermit doesn't come as an Ubuntu package, and building it is a bit special. CUNY stopped supporting it (and Frank) in 2011, so development has slowed way down. A shame, 'cos you can bootstrap Kermit using almost anything and end up with a robust 8-bit file transfer path. cheers, Stewart

On 2020-05-09 11:24 p.m., Alvin Starr via talk wrote:

That sucks that the pin layout no longer supports headers and ribbon cables.

Oh, they do. Just you have to know what format your motherboard uses. This page is a decent guide to the difference: https://www.frontx.com/pro/cpx102_2.html My CP/M box is happily talking away to my Asus right now.

I know people still using UUCP.

I still use SLIP and tcpser sometimes. I don't enjoy it, and once I have a known-working system I will preserve it because so much can go wrong. cheers, Stewart

On 2020-05-10 11:03 a.m., James Knott via talk wrote:

I used SLIP with my first ISP (anyone remember io.org)

io.org sounds familiar. I think I might have used that ISP or maybe I just remember it as one of the early ones back before I was using interlog.com.

IBM's Advantis started using PPP.

I never used SLIP. I used to use ppp to get remote access to a pair of SGI Web Force Indy computers I administered many years ago. -- Cheers! Kevin. http://www.ve3syb.ca/ | "Nerds make the shiny things that https://www.patreon.com/KevinCozens | distract the mouth-breathers, and | that's why we're powerful" Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick

On 2020-05-10 2:12 p.m., Scott Allen via talk wrote:

And here goes another thread off topic again, started by another "back in the day" post.

It didn't start as "back in the day": it was about why my ~2016 ASUS motherboard running Linux didn't recognize its serial port. It turned out to be a standards problem. cheers, Stewart

Mr. Russell, May I ask a side question here? On a couple of other lists to which I belong, one of which involves the development of the freedos project, there were questions about how a USB to serial adapter manages the communications associated, by which a mean port definitions that a serial port used to use. If one is trying to access a device connected with a USB to serial adapter, what port does USB use? for example if the program would talk to a serial device on com 4, how would you achieve the same goal via a USB to serial adapter? thanks, Kare On Sun, 10 May 2020, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:

On 2020-05-10 2:12 p.m., Scott Allen via talk wrote:

...

And here goes another thread off topic again, started by another "back in the day" post.

It didn't start as "back in the day": it was about why my ~2016 ASUS motherboard running Linux didn't recognize its serial port. It turned out to be a standards problem.

cheers, Stewart

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Good evening, a way to ask this question better then. On Sun, 10 May 2020, James Knott via talk wrote:

That depends on the OS.  I have a ThinkPad, with 3 USB ports.  With Linux, it doesn't matter which port I use, the adapter gets the same port number, such as /dev/ttyUSB0, which implies it's tied to a specific adapter.�

Would that number go up, say to USB1 to simulate com 1? For example there are dectalk USB devices, however for the software to find the item a port would need to be associated in Linux or likely in a virtual setting as well. � On the

same computer, with Windows 10, the com port number depends on which USB port the adapter is plugged into.

Is that com port number determined in the Bios or by windows? By which I mean is it software determined or hardware determined? I have never used any USB device with Freedos or

any other DOS.

That is unfortunate. granted I cannot speak to freedos as my machines seem to be too fast for the system. still in ms DOS 7.1 the one I am using now, I have an amazing DOS USB driver that was written by Panasonic. Lets me use my external USB drive for backup among other things. Thanks for the explanation, Kare

Hi again, On Sun, 10 May 2020, James Knott via talk wrote:

...

item  a port would need to be associated in Linux or likely in a virtual setting as well.

I assume it would.  However, I only have one adapter to try it with. I need to find some of those adapters USB to Serial and experiment once I can get mail at my office, or leave the house again.

...

Is  that com port number determined in the Bios or by windows?  By which I mean is it software determined or hardware determined?

Is the BIOS still used for that sort of thing?  I got the impression they gave up on it years ago, as it was so inadequate. That is a fine question. My computers are built for me, interestingly enough by a former IBM staffer who now works for amd. I am embarrassed to say that I did not ask once I started using my USB ports in DOS. what motivated my question was my thinking, perhaps wrongly, that there would be a bios setting for USB hardware ports the way there is / was for other things.

...

I have an OpenDOS 7.01 CD here, which I came across the other day, but haven't done anything with it.  After I left IBM, 20 years ago, I had both PC-DOS 7 and PC-DOS 2000 (Y2K version of PC-DOS 7) on floppies, which I tossed years ago.  However, it's been many years since I did anything with DOS. About four years back I came across project in Germany involving PC DOS and someone else in Europe had a Dr. DOS project too. I would personally love love love a look at that opendos 7.1 cd. Especially as since it is Opendos, it would be a bit more legal than what I am running on the system I am using to write this email grin. Thanks again, Kare

Hi Karen,

Would that number go up,  say to USB1 to simulate com 1?

Kind of. Not quite. Default situation: The first USB serial device you plug in (it doesn't matter which port) appears as /dev/ttyUSB0. The next one becomes /dev/ttyUSB1 There's no way of telling which device is what without digging about in udev rules or making sure you use distinct hardware for each one (like the FTDI, Prolific, QinHeng and Silicon Labs devices I mentioned the other day). Allocation of COM ports under Windows seems to be random. The first device I plug in is usually COM6 or COM9. No idea about DOS.

For example there  are dectalk USB devices, however for  the software to find the item  a port would need to be associated in Linux or likely in a virtual setting as well.

I have a USB DecTalk; well, an EMIC-2 board with an FTDI USB-Serial adapter I homebrewed into a small box with a speaker and headphone jack: https://scruss.com/blog/2016/02/27/t%c9%92k-b%c9%92ks-a-tiny-hardware-speech... . FTDI serial interfaces - although briefly vilified by Linux types - are the easiest to work with under Linux. Each one has a unique serial number, and can be made to appear on a particular port with a little bit of configuration. cheers, Stewart

On 2020-05-11 01:57 AM, Karen Lewellen via talk wrote:

James remark about IRQ lines  can still ring true.  because IBM used them oddly everyone else  decided to sing along.

I used to be a computer tech, on the big systems.  I also designed and built an 8 serial port card for my IMSAI 8080.  In all my experience, I had only seen level triggered interupts or IRQs.  This meant when something needed service, it would pull the signal line low.  This allowed multiple devices to share 1 interrupt line and the OS would sort out which needed to be serviced.  IBM, instead of using that common practice, when with rising edge triggers, which cannot be easily shared.  The Intel interrupt controller chip that was used supported either mode, so there was no valid hardware reason, that I could see, for IBM to choose that method.  If they had gone with level trigger, then we wouldn't have had that IRQ sharing mess we had to deal with on the PC/AT bus.

On 2020-05-11 1:57 a.m., Karen Lewellen wrote:

Actually, that it has a default makes a grand deal of sense.  After all, how often would a person have say 4 of them running at a time?

Um, me, aka the outlier? Right now I have a CP/M machine on ttyS0 (so not USB), the pen plotter on ttyUSB0, the PDP-8 on ttyUSB1, a microcontroller doing Python things on ttyUSB2, Arduinos occasionally connecting as ttyUSB3 or ttyACM0 depending on model ... ... and I don't even *like* serial devices! Yet I seem to be the Spiders Georg of serial ports despite that.

... Wait!  you built a $600 dectalk USB unit in your garage?

In my front room, for about $100, but yes.

Does it provide all 9 voices?

Yup.

Can you make it sing?

Kinda. Most DECTalk songs - and there are *lots* - are written for v4 of the hardware. The board I'm using gives v5, so some of its timing is off.

... I prefer to have a spare, for  slightly less than a thousand, and often find them sold for around $1,500 even today.

They're still expensive because "DECTalk Voice" is a big thing in electronic music. Assistive tech is always expensive, but couple with ebay competition from music nerds and Hawking fanboys, the price goes through the roof.

... Stewart, your comments about speech quality has me wanting to ask something about speech in  Linux, which for the record is reprehensible, even if free.  IBM created a voice known as eloquence ...

I'm not a TTS user, just someone who geeks out on the technology. So much of TTS seems to be very proprietary, thanks to a few IP harvesting companies. Eloquence seems to be an engine that can run under a screen reader framework, and Orca maybe the only game in town for Linux as a screen reader. Licensing actual voices for IBMTTS/Eloquence seems to cost money: not much (maybe $5-10 per voice) but with strict noncommercial terms. I was hopeful that the SVOX Pico TTS system as used on Android would gain more traction, but it's shipped with limited voices and tools. While the code is open source, the parent company was (surprise!) snapped up by Nuance, so we'll never see it go beyond its 2010 capabilities. cheers Stewart

On Sun, 10 May 2020 at 17:30, Karen Lewellen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

for example if the program would talk to a serial device on com 4, how would you achieve the same goal via a USB to serial adapter?

Under Linux, serial ports are named as "files" under the /dev directory, usually starting with tty. Real serial ports are usually name ttySx (with x being a number. USB serial ports are usually named ttyUSBx, or sometimes ttyACMx if it identifies as a modem type device. However, there are ways to give a device any name you like based on its model, manufacturer, serial number or other identifying parameters that the device provides. -- Scott

On Sun, 10 May 2020 at 17:46, Scott Allen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

On Sun, 10 May 2020 at 17:30, Karen Lewellen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

...

for example if the program would talk to a serial device on com 4, how would you achieve the same goal via a USB to serial adapter?

Under Linux, serial ports are named as "files" under the /dev directory, usually starting with tty. Real serial ports are usually name ttySx (with x being a number. USB serial ports are usually named ttyUSBx, or sometimes ttyACMx if it identifies as a modem type device.

However, there are ways to give a device any name you like based on its model, manufacturer, serial number or other identifying parameters that the device provides.

This is something where Once Upon a Time, things were very different. These days, device names are generated dynamically in /dev when a device comes online. Once Upon a Time, if you added a serial port, there would not be a device in /dev until you ran /bin/mknod with suitable arguments to put it there. I recall having to do so back when I did an upgrade to add a fast UART (14550 or 16550 I think); the new serial port did not appear automatically like it would today. Here is a wikipedia page with some of the relevant history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_file#Naming_conventions My mention of /bin/mknod dates back to the days before Linux 2.3, when dinosaurs roamed the earth :-) In 2.3.6, a first edition of dynamic device naming appeared, loosely based on Solaris conventions (so my memory tells me). That was when the fighting began, in many ways not unlike the fights surrounding systemd, and for some of the same reasons. The old-timers knew that they knew better what they wanted their devices names to be than some newfangled mechanism written by some arrogant upstart. That's where the fighting occurs. (With systemd and with the Gooch devfs implementation from around the year 2000.) Of course, there are also reasonable arguments as to why the operating system should be managing more of this for us. They actually are common reasons: we WANT some automation of managing devices because, with modern buses like USB, and network devices, we now plug in new devices frequently, and would like them to just work. devfs was a service for handling the automatic attachment of devices to file nodes in /dev systemd is at least partly about having policies for attaching devices to software services so that USB drives are accessible to users once plugged in and so network services appear at appropriate times too. The notion of using /bin/mknod to manually manage where devices go seems very quaint in 2020. In 2001, that was very much a present fight between people with varying positions on the matter. It's an interesting, albeit somewhat off-topic question, how FreeDOS handles this. I don't think FreeDOS went through the "devfs" evolutionary process which covered a LOT of kinds of devices on Linux. I'd expect FreeDOS to do one of two things: a) Number the ports physically (by some measure) so you need to pick COM1, COM2, COM3, and perhaps guess which is which b) Offer some command loosely similar to /bin/mknod to let you configure COM ports. A web search finds a thread on an HP web site: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Operating-Systems-and-Recovery/RS232-S... The parts of that which seem informative point at FreeDOS having a command/program called MODE that seems to be how you configure COM ports. Here is a link to MODE, which I think might be helpful. http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Mode -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

On 2020-05-10 02:04 PM, Kevin Cozens via talk wrote:

io.org sounds familiar. I think I might have used that ISP or maybe I just remember it as one of the early ones back before I was using interlog.com.

It was a Toronto based ISP.  This was back in the day when commercial use of the Internet was still questionable.  IIRC, io.org had some sort of dodgy connection to UofT for access to the Internet. BTW, while trying to dig up some info on io.org, I came across this article.  I worked at 151 Front St. W. for about 17 years with CN Telecommunications/CNCP/Unitel.  I was also back in there, for a few days, a couple of years ago, doing some work for Freedom Mobile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Internet_Exchange