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Date:      Wed, 28 Feb 1996 23:04:48 -0500
From:      "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>, Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com>, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement... 
Message-ID:  <199602290404.XAA16136@wa3ymh.transsys.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 27 Feb 1996 11:30:59 PST." <13132.825449459@time.cdrom.com> 

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I'll buck the trend here and praise the existance of PCI bus slots,
which are a marked improvement in usability of EISA bus slots.  

I've got a DEC EISA 486 box at work, and it's always a pain in the
butt to make work because whenever you want to plug a new card in, you
have to boot the "magic EISA configuration disk".  That is, once you
remember where last you put it.  Then you fiddle around with it, and
hope you don't move things around and tempt fate.

I compare this to the system I've put together at home.  It's got a
Tyan Titan III motherboard in it, with 4 PCI slots.  I've got a #9
Motion 771 in one slot, a NCR 825 SCSI in another, and DEC PCI
ethernet in the third.  

No muss, no fuss, all that worked fine on the first try without having
to tell the BIOS any hints along the way.  It's not like I've got real
high-bandwidth Ethernet requirements here at home with just 3 other
machines and a 56K internet connection; on the other hand, I didn't
have even think about running out of IRQs, DMA channels, etc.  It all
Just Worked.

Heck, PCI should have been the way to do Plug-and-Play, and not on the
ISA bus.  By the way, the only ISA bus card in the box is a GUS P-n-P
sound board, and it's got its own growing pains to make it work on
Windoz 95 and FreeBSD.

EISA - good riddens!  I dread everytime I open the machine up at work
and having to invoke the spirits on the EISA config disk.  I just know
that it's going to get me bad one day.  This nonsense is one of the
stupid things they inherited for IBM MCA systems.  Anyone else
remember the PS/2 "reference disks" that defined the machine config?
Feh.

I'm really happy to have a mostly CPU independent bus in the box, so
when I replace the base system with a 1GHz Alpha in a few years, I'll
probably still be able to use the video board.

louie





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