Aza D. Oberman wrote: > As though anticipating this thread, Joe Campbell in "C Programmer's Guide to > Serial Communications", Howard Sams & Co., 1978, remarks as follows on page > 144: > > "The IBM PC family represents the height of folly in this regard, where the > system -- DOS and ROM BIOS -- does not contain simple unadorned functions > to perform character-by-character serial I/O. Interesting to hear a comment about the IBM PC in a book three years before the PC appeared.... Anyway: the BIOS routines for the serial port far from fancy. But when you accessed the hardware directly (bypassing BIOS) the Async Adapter performed much much better than via BIOS. I never experienced the 'required' handshaking in this way. Regards, Rob. -- Rob Hamerling, Vianen, NL phone +31-347-322822 homepage: http://www.robh.nl/ -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist