Serial port usage on Mac OS/X?

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Sun Mar 30 22:20:35 UTC 2003


On Sunday, March 30, 2003, at 11:15  AM, Ned Konz wrote:

> On Sunday 30 March 2003 10:38 am, John M McIntosh wrote:
>> I know Dan Ingalls was using a serial to USB box, has lots of
>> horror stories
>> about software in such devices. I build a new VM years ago for him
>> which support many more than 2 serial devices.
>
> I designed built the USB to serial device myself (it's actually part
> of a microcontroller board), so I know how it works. However, I
> didn't write the drivers.
>
> Did your serial support get into the stock VM?

Yes, all of that is there.

>
> Now if the device supports Carbon applications, the current Squeak
>> VM just
>> asks the communications manager to iterate over the devices that
>> support serial and gets a list back.
>
> There is a Mac OS/X driver, as well as an OS8/9 driver. I put in the
> OS/X driver. I assume it provides the normal Unix tty support ioctls
> and file operations.

Yes, the carbon squeak VM doesn't support any unix ioctl stuff.  
Someday, perhaps but
the amount of people doing serial stuff is so rare it's not been an  
issue.

>
>> I'll look later for more info. Also see
>>
>> MidiPrimTester new getPortList
>
> I tried that. It only reports the (software) Quicktime MIDI.
>
> What has MIDI got to do with serial, anyway (besides the fact that
> older Macs used the same physical hardware for both)?

Well it interacts with the serial stuff, and some of the calls build  
port information that the serial smalltalk code doesn't. You'll note  
the serial class is very sparse.

>
> Thanks,
> --  
> Ned Konz
> http://bike-nomad.com
> GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE
>
>
>
>
--
======================================================================== 
===
John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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