About Macintosh Serial Expansion
Why more serial ports?
How do I add more serial ports to my Mac?
1. Serial Switches
2. NuBus Serial Expansion cards
4. External via SCSI
You can use a Creative Solutions SCSI-based external serial expansion unit. These add two or four ports each and appear to work reasonably well with PCI Macs. For multiple line, high load applications (like busy BBS, fax or mail servers), only one or two of these devices can be added per Mac before excessive motherboard CPU slowdown begins to occur (typically 10% slowdown per SCSI box). Thus this method is only practical for two to four ports at 115,200 baud or up eight ports at 38,400 baud.
5. External via Ethernet.
You can add an external Ethernet serial expander or wide area router. This may be an ideal solution for adding up to eight ports to a medium to large network. However, these ports are exclusively for wide area servers and typically are not useful for connecting to printers, scanners, fax modems, or voice mail handlers. High "traffic" with several high-speed modems or ISDN adapters will put a heavy load on the Ethernet channel.
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