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| Author | modem question (Read 3545 times) | ||||||||||||||
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helloimjoe
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on: April 06, 2007, 03:17
Hi, you'll all probably have to deal with a lot of dumb questions from me but im new to old macs. My question is if you have a 28k modem on your mac (I'm hoping to get a power macintosh 5260/100 @ a school sale), will using a 56k connection do anything bad to the modem? Thanks in advance! |
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dpaanlka
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1024 MB  Posts: 1646 
Reply #1 on: April 06, 2007, 03:54
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The Power Macintosh 5200 series is not compatible with 56k modems because of severe hardware limitations of that system as they were designed by Apple to be very cheap. Here is a link to where you can read all about how these are possibly the worst Macs ever made. Do not pay for one of these, unless it has the TV tuner card installed (most of them do). The TV tuner was just about the only thing they did really well. If you can find a 5400, that would be much better. It is the same body style, but doesn't suffer from the problems of the 5200 and 5300.
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #2 on: April 06, 2007, 05:28
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Macintosh Serial Ports are explained in great detail in this article. Apple explains how Mac Serial Ports deal with high speed modems in this article. The PM5200 is not considered one of Apple's better designs and has many comprimises incorporated into it. Overall though it will perform about as well as the PowerBook 5300, or a PowerBook 1400/117. It is perfectly able to to work with the 28k modem you mention, and it would work fine with a faster modem as well. Every Mac serial port since the first Mac has been able to do a minimum of 230,000 bits/second for serial communication. Communication with a modem involves two different speeds. There is the speed the modem talks to the phone line, which is how the modem is labeled (28.8k, 33.6k etc). The second speed involves how fast the modem can talk to the computer. In the case of Macs that is a minimum of 230k. As modems got faster, they also began to incorporate other features such as compression so that more data could be sent. The modems themselves do the compression and decompression. That means a newer faster modem will be exchanging more data with the computer than it will with the phone line. That is because data being sent between the modem and the computer will always be uncompressed, while data being sent between the modem and the phone line might be compressed. Protocols for serial communication have always had data signals so that either the computer could tell the modem or the modem could tell the computer to quit sending data. This is refered to as handshaking. At some point it was decided (by modem manufactures) that handshaking should be done in hardware. Hardware handshaking can result in overall data through put being faster. However, serial data commumication protocols are very robust with a great deal of built in redundancy so no data is going to be lost with or without hardware handshaking. Reading through the manual for telecom software you will note that all of the various software package have features that enable them to work around any limitations that might be imposed by the lack of hardware hand shaking. LowEnd Macs tends to state many older Macs as having limitations on their serial ports, and that is simply not justified. I have used a 56k modem on a Mac SE and experienced data transfers at nearly the same speed as I have on Beige G3s with 56k modems. I got a bit long winded, sorry. bill
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dpaanlka
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1024 MB Posts: 1646
Reply #3 on: April 06, 2007, 05:33
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Interesting. Well regardless, the rest of that LEM article still applies and I can personally attest to the horrible performance of all my 5200s and 5300s.
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