Ok, Many thanks for all the tips, plenty to look at there. A couple of points.
The modem is correctly on the serial port. It just has an extra parallel port at the back, Microcom were punting this heavily at one stage as a superior method of connection for some reason or another. Reading the Modem-HOWTO I see that the primary job of a serial port is to convert input data from the bus (parallel) to a serial output. Perhaps Microcom decided to do this on the modem board itself, in which case we effectively have an internal modem in a box outside the computer. Right, everything is a file, even a device, and has a permission. Never thought of that and will look at it soonest. I was getting no reaction from the modem with a command sent as an echo. Neither did I succeed in either sending anything from minicom, what I mean is that I could not even type an AT command to send in minicom, nothing would appear on the screen from the keyboard. Will probably connect the modem onto the W98 box to see that it does operate and remove any nagging doubts in that direction. Will look at the matter again soonest Regards Ian Ian Balchin ------------------------------------------------------------------ Fables Bookshop, 119 High Street, Grahamstown, 6139, South Africa email [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone or Fax +27-(0)46-636-1525 cell: 083-495-7353 sms [EMAIL PROTECTED] Founder Member Southern African Book Dealers Association http;//www.imaginet.co.za/fables All of literature is a space in which a variety of writers, none of them original, blend and crash. Roland Barthes, in `Mythologies', 1957