[rescue] Sun SBus serial cards

[Doug McIntyre]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 06:20:38PM -0400, Mark Price via rescue wrote:
> I am looking for a SBus serial card to use on a Sun4m system.  If anyone
> has one they'd like to donate/sell/lend, please let me know :)
> 
> The only serial-related card I see on ebay is listed as "high speed" which
> I'm guessing is not applicable to my use case (RS-232 modems) and I don't
> recognize the connector port.

So, you need more async serial ports than the two that came on the system?

Async serial cards were pretty rare in general. While there weren't none, companies
did tend to make lots of things for lots of markets, including custom Sun S-Bus async serial.

Most likely the listing you found was for a Sun HSI card, which in general was
synch serial for supportint X.25 connections. Probably not what you are looking for,
but was very common so there are lots out there. 
There was the SAI (Serial-Async) card, but I had never seen one in the wild.

What most people did needing more async serial ports than 2 was to run a terminal server
box over the network, such as the Xylogics or Cisco ones.
We had some MicroAnnex XL Xylogics boxes (8 or 16 ports).
Connect up a bunch of modems into the MicroAnnexXL box, and then 
they could be setup to telnet/rsh into the Sun box automatically when dialed into
once the user authenticated via whatever method (probably RADIUS).