[time-nuts] Lucent KS-24361, HP/Symmetricom Z3809A, Z3810A, Z3811A, Z3812A GPSDO system

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Tue Nov 4 14:31:52 EST 2014


brooke at pacific.net said:
> UARTs are not mandatory, a simple transistor level shifting circuit is all
> that's needed for TTL/RS-232 levels. 

I think you are confusing UARTs with level shifters.

In the old days, transistors were expensive enough that a 68000 class CPU was 
all that could fit on a chip.  All memory and peripherals were off chip.

While not quite mandatory, most of the time it made sense to use a UART chip. 
 If you had a FPGA, you could put a simple UART in there.  (But back then, 
FPGAs weren't very big either.)  If the CPU was idle, you could bit-bang 
things.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.





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