Flip,
Sounds like typical telephone wiring. Here in the United States
typical telephone lines to residences have four strands of copper wire--
red, green, yellow and black--as you describe. Only two are needed to
make a connection. The other two are redundant or can be used for an
additional connection or as a replacement if it should be needed.
On Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:00:39 +0100, Flip ter Biecht wrote:
> Hello,
> I made it back to the shop with my e-tech pci56-rwm and the receipt, and
> they told me something about winmodems, hardware modems and "old fashioned"
> modems. (Best go for the last ones).
> The winmodems use the main CPU (see Steves description below), the modern,
> PnP PCI "hardware" modems have their own CPU, but no UART, and the old ones
> have all on board. The e-tech rwm is supposed to work with a PNP aware
> linux, as well as win9x.
> Not with dos, however, unless there's some utility to communicate with the
> bios during startup. A software driver seems really nessecary to use this
> modem, possibly since a "modem enumerator" is installed together with a
> load of voice-fax-whatever drivers. A software UART though, might be more
> or less standardised, and thus available for linux (But what manufacturer
> would be motivated to provide such for DOS)
>> From: Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> To expand... it's actually the UART chip which winmodems are
>> missing. (Universal Asynchronous Reciever Transmitter) This chip
>> sends signals *through* the serial port. It isn't a "comport"
>> itself.
>> An internal modem has its own UART onboard. An external modem
>> uses the UART on the motherboard which is associated with the
>> serial port in use, and of course a "winmodem" / "software modem" /
>> "modem emulator" simply has no UART at all.
>> Instead of using a hardware UART, it uses a software UART
>> emulator, which puts load on your CPU that should rightfully be
>> delegated a separate hardware UART. (Bill Gates refers to this
>> as "using excess CPU cycles"... as if IE is such a lightweight
>> app that it leaves the CPU sitting their idling... ehem)
> Considering the compaq video card (and of course compaq is widely used for
> standardising speed indexes in norton and other tech software) I just
> wondered why this one won't be recognised. There is a Trident chip on it
> (if I'm not mistaken; maybe a cirrus, but surely one well known brand) and
> win95 uses a standard compaq.drv. Maybe I should just wait for Michael to
> declare arachne 1.70 stable.
> But now for something completely sightly different (and I don't know wether
> it has to do with national telephone specs): Does anyone know why a
> telephone plug has either 2 or 4 wires, and both plug types can be used
> combined, with no warnings or explanations, until a modem connected with 4
> wires downs the whole phone line after a phone has interrupted a
> ppp-connection some times? (As if this interruption has blown a circuit in
> the "extra" two lines in the modem; all works fine after the crash, but
> only with a two wire line, while before there wasn't a problem with any
> connector or line.)???
> (Dutch telephone comes traditionally through a 4 wired line, in which the
> middle 2 are red and green and are the ones actually used. The other 2 are
> usually yellow and black. Cables provided with telephones or modems usually
> have just the middle wires connected, but cables bought seperately -like
> the 10 meters I used- have all 4. No difference was noticed, before a 4
> wired cable "blew" the modem which just may have something to do with
> picking up a phone on the same line, and I've not tested it's replacement
> with such a cable yet...)
> Anyway, now I can use arachne in real dos mode through an external 14k4 on
> com2 with the 4 wired line to it, win95 uses an internal e-tech 56k which
> connects with 2 wires through the 14k4, The compaq card renders 640x480x16
> only (not even 800x600x16 :-(, but maybe a vesa driver for dos would exist.)
> Bart
Sam Ewalt
Croswell, Michigan
USA
-- Arachne V1.70, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
