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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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