What Does Digi Do?
May. 7th, 2003 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkI can't believe all you people asking for the answer to that question. Are you SURE you want to know? Well, okay, if you insist.
Well, first you've got your legacy products, which are various little doohickeys that let you *yawn* multiplex multiple devices off your PC's serial or modem port. Some of these are little black boxes, but most of them are boards. Hence, the original name of the company: Digiboard. That was pretty much what I thought Digi made, but I was hoping that sometime in the last 15 years they had thought of something more interesting. And they have (anyway, more interesting to networking geeks).
Their more recent products are little black boxes or boards that let you turn your Ethernet port into a serial port! Just exactly what everyone wants to do, right? The idea is that you still want to plug your PC into some sort of serial device, but now you can do it over a TCP/IP network. It's like channel extension, only with ASYNC. It's like iSCSI. It's even a little bit like Front End Processors. As it happens, I have worked on all of the aforementioned arcane devices, which might be why they wanted to hire me. (Although I suspect they really just wanted somebody that knew how to write a glitzy test report with colored charts and graphs.)
So aren't y'all glad you asked? Hey, Karen, wake up! Remember when we were trapped in that elevator waiting for "Engineering" to hike up to the top floor of the hotel and push the reset button? I now realize that this was because the elevator controller was plugged directly into some little computer on the 14th floor. If the Millennium had only had a DigiOne RealPort TS4, they could have connected to their elevator controllers over a network from anyplace in the hotel (preferably someplace convenient for the engineer, like the hotel bar). Or if they really wanted to get space age, as befits their name, they could have used a laptop with a wireless connection. Or the engineer could have dialed in to the network from home. Maybe we can request in next year's hotel contract that they network their elevators?
Well, first you've got your legacy products, which are various little doohickeys that let you *yawn* multiplex multiple devices off your PC's serial or modem port. Some of these are little black boxes, but most of them are boards. Hence, the original name of the company: Digiboard. That was pretty much what I thought Digi made, but I was hoping that sometime in the last 15 years they had thought of something more interesting. And they have (anyway, more interesting to networking geeks).
Their more recent products are little black boxes or boards that let you turn your Ethernet port into a serial port! Just exactly what everyone wants to do, right? The idea is that you still want to plug your PC into some sort of serial device, but now you can do it over a TCP/IP network. It's like channel extension, only with ASYNC. It's like iSCSI. It's even a little bit like Front End Processors. As it happens, I have worked on all of the aforementioned arcane devices, which might be why they wanted to hire me. (Although I suspect they really just wanted somebody that knew how to write a glitzy test report with colored charts and graphs.)
So aren't y'all glad you asked? Hey, Karen, wake up! Remember when we were trapped in that elevator waiting for "Engineering" to hike up to the top floor of the hotel and push the reset button? I now realize that this was because the elevator controller was plugged directly into some little computer on the 14th floor. If the Millennium had only had a DigiOne RealPort TS4, they could have connected to their elevator controllers over a network from anyplace in the hotel (preferably someplace convenient for the engineer, like the hotel bar). Or if they really wanted to get space age, as befits their name, they could have used a laptop with a wireless connection. Or the engineer could have dialed in to the network from home. Maybe we can request in next year's hotel contract that they network their elevators?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-05-07 07:55 pm (UTC)B
no subject
Date: 2003-05-07 08:43 pm (UTC)I'm awake, just unable to type much given how much my hand hurts. Fsck.
Get your sales guys onto the Millenium, and then we'll dial in to their elevator from home. That'll be fun.
K. [was just thinking about that poor little kid we were stuck with]
no subject
Date: 2003-05-08 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-08 01:34 pm (UTC)"...tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred..."
no subject
Date: 2003-05-12 02:35 pm (UTC)You were lucky they had running water.