Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 10:04:56 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement... Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960227095437.19218C-100000@covina.lightside.com> In-Reply-To: <12662.825442441@time.cdrom.com>
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On Tue, 27 Feb 1996, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > So was EISA. The point is that we didn't need a VLB bus and we almost > certainly didn't need PCI - we just needed to finish making EISA > better (wider and faster) and we'd have then seen motherboards with 8 > or more *entirely general purpose* slots, not this split bus crap we > see now. The decision to kill EISA was a pure marketing one - nobody > wanted people to keep their old boards since those were already sold. > They wanted everyone to buy new and totally incompatible boards. Speaking of marketing, EISA was always positioned as the high-end board for SERVERS, so both the motherboard and cards were always more expensive. Only a few high-end desktop machines (e.g. Compaq, which I wouldn't buy for incompatibility reasons alone), came with EISA as standard. This continued to be true throughout VLB and PCI. If boards and cards were AVAILABLE and AFFORDABLE, then I would've bought into EISA like a shot, but it was always positioned as a "server" solution only.. > Besides, anybody who's actually tried just to *plug a VLB board in* > knows that VLB was the bus equivalent of the anti-christ. I have a > VLB video card (#9) that I had to take the friggin' guide pin off of > just because actually screwing it down would cause the board to pop > back out of the socket, and my experience was hardly unique. No, it must've been you. Those super-long cards just popped into my system, I didn't have to rock them back and forth or hear (beep-beep beep-beep-beep-beep) from my AMI BIOS when they weren't plugged in all the way! :-) :-) Actually, I felt like an idiot when a MAC user, of all people, pointed out that I forgot to install the little brass standoffs on my homebrow system (it was hangin' by those little plastic tendons).. Now the VLB cards plugin a little easier, and they're more likely to work, but I know what you mean.. :-) > I repeat: Feh. Well, what they should've done is fix the Zorro bus in the Amiga, and then things would've been perfect. They had AutoConfig since 1986, man... <Amiga bitterness mode off..> ;-) ---Jake
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