from Gert Doering
	
While Class 2 and Class 2.0 modems do most of the dirty work
themselves, clever modem manufacturers seem to drift toward implementing
only class 1 fax modes. Probably so they can use smaller proms while
also integrating voice functionality. Well, they want to see $$$,
too..
The bad thing with Class 1 is, the modem expects all the dirty work to
be done by the host computer. After all, why did you buy a Pentium II
300MHz? Just for hitting on a few keys from time to time? So you have
a very fast cpu and there should be no problem to do something every n
ms? Right? Wrong! Most of the Unix systems out there don't have
realtime extensions (this *is* a real time job, after all), and if
they have, there's no real standard to these extensions, so generally
it's not possible to maintain that strain. Windows knows how to use
class 1 modems? Yeah, sure, the multitasking is quite different, you
can quite easily exclude other processes from running, because you
just want to have that high priority process. And if you insist in
doing some other time consuming tasks, your fax might no be very
readable... So, so much prosa for this situation, you still might see
some class 1 support in the near future. Just hang on and in the
meantime, boycott modem manufacturers who only support class 1 modes.

Some parts © 2009 Advameg, Inc.