>The trend today among hardware manufacturers is to cut costs
>by moving tasks formerly done in hardware to host software.
>More powerful host processors are making this possible. For
>example, you could build a modem that consists of a line
>interface and a D/A and A/D converter pair. Modulation and
>demodulation, ie. the hard part in building a modem, would be
>implemented in host software. Compared to the case where a
>modem is implemented using a signal processor executing code
>from mask ROM, why should the modem maker not be worried about
>giving away something valuable to the competition by
>publishing the source code? >Another example are passive ISDN
boards, which typically >consist of two Siemens chips plus an
address decoder. The hard >part in providing a ready-to-go ISDN
solution is no the >production of the ISDN boards, but the host
software doing all >the signaling and data transfer according to
various >protocols. There are several manufacturers producing
almost >identical ISDN boards. Don't te