From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Feb 27 10:05:18 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id KAA08551 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 27 Feb 1996 10:05:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from covina.lightside.com (covina.lightside.com [198.81.209.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA08541 for ; Tue, 27 Feb 1996 10:05:15 -0800 (PST) Received: by covina.lightside.com (Smail3.1.28.1 #6) id m0trTlp-0009YsC; Tue, 27 Feb 96 10:05 PST Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 10:04:56 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: Narvi , Poul-Henning Kamp , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement... In-Reply-To: <12662.825442441@time.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk 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... ;-) ---Jake