Yes there are and they come in many flavors. I used a 4-port board for
years on my 3winks BBS (remember before the internet?). It allowed sharing
of interrupts and worked great. It also allowed use of the "AT" interrupts
which are those above 10 and are on the smaller connector in the ISA
card. My old BBS could chug along and the operating system didn't even
know it was using the com ports. There are a lot of PCI cards that are
popular now and I am using one of them with 2 ports now. They do great
with windows. Have not tried the USB Com ports, but when I was first
looking for the additional port card, many of the folks at the computer
stores said that they didn't exist. Look bqack through the archive for
this newsgroup and you will find references to all of these. My card is
made by LAVA and they have a whole line of cards as do others to choose from.
73 Stan, N3HS (ex W3INK)
To: <writelog@contesting.com>
>Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 21:41:20 -0500
>From: Carter Grabarczyk <k8vt@ameritech.net>
>To: writelog@contesting.com, wf1b-rtty@wf1b.com
>Subject: [WriteLog] Comm ports
>Sender: owner-writelog@contesting.com
>
>It seems that the consensus on USB to serial ports is that there is no
>consensus (not to mention problems like "stuttering and not passing
>Baudot).
>
>I have heard that there are such things and serial port cards that use
>one slot and have 4 (?) com ports out. The trick is that this card has
>its own microprocessor on board that is a "traffic cop" for the IRQs.
>They are supposedly a little pricey ($100-125) because of the on-board
>microprocessor (but the USB to serial devices aren't exactly cheap
>either).
>
>Any comments or suggestions as to if they work and which one to get?
>
>Thanks,
>
>73/Carter/K8VT
>
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