Of course, nobody in their right mind would even consider running a
hard real-time application (e.g. industrial process control) on a
general purpose OS -- especially on a machine with a cache and MMU.
It's pointless to talk about such applications, because they simply
aren't going to happen.

And personally I'm happy with that, because the liability issues make
my head spin.


Now, can we talk about something that's actually relevant for a bit?
There's enough buffering in the Winmodems that we just need to keep a
low expected response time.  This is really not much different in
principal from driving a crappy PC serial chip, except that we have to
do a bit more work on the CPU.

`I don't see what the problem is.'