Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 18:01:14 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> To: Brett_Glass@ccgate.infoworld.com (Brett Glass) Cc: sef@kithrup.com, questions@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Which dual Pentium motherboard? Cyrix SMP? Message-ID: <199606090101.SAA13867@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <9605088342.AA834264287@ccgate.infoworld.com> from Brett Glass at "Jun 8, 96 02:56:54 pm"
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> > This makes the card not a _pure_ EISA card. If it has resources on it > > that respond to I/O cycles that are not controlled by the EISA > > configuration parameters, the card is in violation of the EISA spec. > > Perhaps true. But of course, given the choice between "purity" and a > gazillion or so support calls, we all know which any vendor in his right > mind will choose. Not so sure on that, Adaptec choice was ``purity'' and BusTek/Buslogic made the other choice. :-) > > Yepp.... it's just not a pretty picture either way you dice it. Remeber, > > part of the idea of EISA was to eliminate jumper settings and go to a > > soft configure, but everyone seems to have cheated on this one :-(. > > The problem is that the spec wasn't well thought-out -- in quite a number > of ways. There was no way to "bootstrap;" that is, a machine whose floppy > controller was not configured to work could not run the configuration > program. > > The configuration programs were also horrors: big, slow, and ugly. > And a full set of configuration files couldn't fit on a disk. The bad > engineering that went into that software is largely responsible for the > failure of EISA. I would disagree here as to the software being largely responsible for the failure of EISA, cost was the number one reason for failure, hardware cost that is. People just wouldn't pay the price for EISA systems, VLB and PCI where successful only after the price difference between ISA systems and VLB/PCI came to be ``reasonable''. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD
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