BG> Keith, at 17:07 on May 19 1996, you wrote to Bill Grimsley...

KR> were selling zoom 14k4 fax modems for $us69 back in feb 95.

BG> I wouldn't mind betting that the cheap Zoom was an RPI modem, and that
BG> you made a very wise choice by not buying it.

KR> what is rpi? a yum cha company?

 BG> Nope, it's "Rockwell Protocol Interface", and these
modems are cheap
 BG> because they have no error correction (bit-stripping) in hardware. 
 BG> You have to use the supplied software if you want EC, and it's as
 BG> inefficient as buggery.  Zoom were one of the first to use that
 BG> chipset, and Banksia have also done it here.

yes i saw something like that in the states. i thought that they were
intel, using the cpu to do the work. intel are pushing that line, to sell
faster and faster cpus presumably. these zooms, however, were perfectly
normal 14k4 fax modems, just cheap. in fact there were quite a few modems
around the $us100 mark, one of the few things that were a *lot* cheaper.
most of the stuff was cheaper, but not enough to really bother about, i
found though that the cartridges for my stylus colour were $us32 as against
$a90, and an hp flatbed scanner for $us450 were too good to go past.

KR> i do have it on good authority, that dial and busy tones aside, they do 
KR> work really well.

 BG> In this case, your "good authority" is wrong.  They're
absolute crap. 
 BG> :)

in this case, i implicitly trust the source, i hear that download speeds of
1650cps (on compressed files) are normal in a heavy multitasking
environment, so i dont think that they could be the ones that you refer to.

                         keith
@EOT:

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