Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 09:29:08 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby) Cc: terry@lambert.org, jkh@time.cdrom.com, narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee, phk@critter.tfs.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement... Message-ID: <199602282259.JAA19843@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960227201915.27863A-100000@covina.lightside.com> from "Jake Hamby" at Feb 27, 96 08:23:11 pm
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Jake Hamby stands accused of saying: > > BTW, Multibus and QBus had autoconfig way before 1986, FWIW. > > AutoConfig was a trademark of Commodore. The Zorro I and II buses were > basically a local bus (straight off the 68000 chip), but Zorro III was an > asynchronous bus that could adaptively negotiate clock speed and feature > set with individual cards (backwards compatible with Zorro II, but Zorro I > was very shortlived). But come to think of it, since all of the cards > were memory-mapped, and the 680x0 has shared IRQ and DMA channels, there > was only the memory range to allocate to AutoConfig it. Interestingly, > the OS was smart enough to boot off of hard drive controller boards by > loading in the driver from a ROM, and could also AutoConfig RAM expansion > boards and add the RAM to the free memory pool... ... still all old hat by the time they got around to it. As the previous poster mentioned, Multibus (yecch, you want to bitch about connectors? 8), Qbus and a plethora of others were doing it years before. See Also VME, and a dozen or two I've missed. EISA bombed because of the angst around the connector designs (remember the 'video specific' side-connectors? *shudder*), and vendors who decided that it would only go into their high-end machines. MCA bombed because someone at IBM decided they wanted to make money out of a bus spec. PCI? Well, I guess we'll have to wait on that one. > ---Jake -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] Collector of old Unix hardware. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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