What is considered "high speed" ?  At 115,200bps, seems that one could
    transfer the content in about 91 seconds, or did I miss something?

    1,048,576 bytes / ~11,520 bytes/second = 91.02 seconds.

Multiply by 2.2 or so for "Intel Hex format."  Another factor of 2 for
xmodem or some other inefficient download protocol (I don't THINK you want
to load 1MB of code without a reliable transfer protocol, although many
programmers I've used just rely on the checking inherent in the Intel
format.  There are windowed download protocols that permit near-full
linespeed, but they're less common.)

It's still not an unreasonable amount of time, IMO.  If you're doing the
more-likely 27c256 or 27c512 (32k or 64k bytes, nicely matching the address
space of a 8051-style micro...), serial should be plenty quick...

BillW

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