At 03:38 p.m. 16/04/2007 +1200, Neil Gardner wrote:
Ergh... Hate to say this, but don't you have that 10 bits to the byte thing approximately ass-backwards?
No. As I said, I come from an Ancient World (TM), where we debugged protocols like DDCMP with a Tek Logic Analayser, scope or logic probe. None of this Ethereal stuff, ethernet hadn't escaped from PARC and Vint was still drawing on envelopes. RS-232 was modern, current loop was till very active (sorry, no pun intended). (Probably Michael Newberry is the only one who will get it anyway, Andy and Sid say they're too young, and the others are looking blank) Each Byte is (or was) a START bit, 8 data bits, PARITY and a STOP or IDLE bit. So we always approximated it to 10 bits. (different devices handle parity bits different ways, it used to be that if there was no parity, no bit was used. LSI USARTS started the trend towards always having a bit used. This is a world where a serial port took up a whole UNIBUS slot (ie a card 400mm by 200mm). As I said, its an approximation for budgeting purposes and comes from an ancient era. Have you found the beer yet ? R