On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 01:33:14PM -0700, Erik E. Fair wrote:
> Ahhh. This probably comes under the heading of what used to be
> called Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI), a few years ago. About
> the time that Sun & SGI and others put built-in ISDN interfaces in
> their workstations.

IIRC ISDN was all the rage back in (about) 1986 - I went to a load
of meetings about it.  I might even recall discussions of an API
designed by non-engineers (about as useful as the one the pcmcia
spec might suggest you implement!).

I think the ISA ISDN card was about the first double sided surface
mount card our (big) company actually made.

> The telephone companies in the USA never priced ISDN calls to match
> POTS calls, so ISDN was never accepted by the market in the USA.
> Which is why the only RJ-45 connector on a modern computer is for
> Ethernet.

Much the same in the uk...
Some other Euorpean countries have cheaper ISDN calls.
I believe that in Sweden even X.21 (not to be confused with X.21 bis)
had call setup charges that made it cost effective to do SNA polling
by making a call for each poll request!

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk