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- Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems
- Path: sparky!uunet!microsoft!wingnut!tnixon
- From: tnixon@microsoft.com (Toby Nixon)
- Subject: Re: v26bis (honestly)
- Message-ID: <1993Jan23.041318.19307@microsoft.com>
- Date: 23 Jan 93 04:13:18 GMT
- Organization: Microsoft Corporation, Redmond WA, USA
- References: <JRiJXB14w165w@zswamp.UUCP> <H.eg.EebkjQbjFHg@mips.ruessel.sub.org>
- Lines: 29
-
- In article <JRiJXB14w165w@zswamp.UUCP> geoff@zswamp.UUCP wrote:
- > naddy@mips.ruessel.sub.org (Christian Weisgerber) writes:
- > > In <A22413@F.maus.de>, Sevo Stille writes:
- > > I *think* it is character-based contrary to the nowadays more popular
- > > bit synchronous protocols like SDLC/HDLC. There should be some people
- > > reading this group who know more about Bisync or still work with it.
- > > Anybody willing to share some information?
- > Actually, I believe that the BInary SYNChronous protocol was the basis for
- > SDLC.
-
- Nope. Sevo was right. BiSync is a character-oriented synchronous protocol. The
- international standard equivalent is ISO "Basic Mode" (ISO 1177, I think). The
- original protocol wasn't transparent -- certain specific characters were used
- for protocol control and weren't permitted to appear in data. The protocol was
- subsequently extended with the now-well-known "DLE" transparency scheme so that
- the data could contain any character patterns.
-
- The bit synchronous protocols were developed later. HDLC is a "catalog" of
- protocol elements, rather than a protocol itself; many other protocols are
- based on HDLC, such as LAPB, LAPD, LAPM, LLC, etc. SDLC, on the other hand,
- is a link-layer protocol itself; it shares the same bit-level framing as
- HDLC protocols (i.e., the ISO 3309 frame structure), but the frame contents
- in SDLC are different (address fields, control fields, etc.).
-
- At one time, I did quite a bit of work writing terminal emulator firmware
- for IBM mainframes based on BiSync protocol (3271/3277). I also worked on
- HASP RJE protocols. What do you need to know?
-
- -- Toby
-