#: 9854 S12/OS9/68000 (OSK)
    18-Mar-91  05:59:21
Sb: #9845-The MM/1 Serial Port!
Fm: James Jones 76257,562
To: Keith H. March 70541,1413

At 160 feet you may run into problems.  The RS-232 standard says no more than
fifty feet--this constraint is present because if a serial device puts out a
signal that is just within specs, past that distance it isn't usable.  A place
I used to work had trouble with that once: we had terminals hooked up over a
distance of fifty feet or a bit over, and they worked just fine, but a lab
instrument with RS-232 out was flaky.  A friend with more hardware knowledge
than me or my boss hooked up an oscilloscope, and one could see very easily the
effects of cable capacitance and resistance.  Smoothed that signal right out
into mush.

One can get special low-capacitance cable for longer serial runs, though I
don't recall how far one can go with it.