Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 17:57:55 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Andrew C. Hornback" <hornback@wireco.net> Cc: chat@freebsd.org, tedm@toybox.placo.com Subject: Re: Now a little OT but RE: FreeBSD and Linux (More Questions!) Message-ID: <15024.1411.79596.364926@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <46214260@toto.iv>
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Andrew C. Hornback <hornback@wireco.net> types:
> > >also remember working with snow white and the seven dwarfs, and
> > >already knew that interoperability was something you got
> > in a computer
> > >line, at least until the manufacturer decided to play
> > shell games to
> > >kill the third party hardware market.
> Hmm... shall we say, IBM here? Just how many manufacturers adopted
> MCA? IBM, Tandy did a couple of machines with it ('course, Tandy
> always followed IBM's lead with strange hardware designs... Tandy 1000
> SX followed the PC jr., need I say more?). I believe Siemens,
> Northridge, and possibly Fujitsu produced machines with MCA support.
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of IBM moving the
controller smarts from the system box into the drive in the 360/370
line. A federal judge told them their near-monopoly position made that
an anticompetitive practice, and hence illegal. The other case that
comes to mind was their adding instructions for an OS release to
prevent Amdahl from using the OS release directly. Amdahl's response
was to provide a version of the OS with the "new" instructions
unrolled inline. I'd call that Open Source software at it's best, but
I don't know that it met the current definition for Open Source.
> > I don't remember if there was a lot of crossover between
> > the mainframe and
> > PC people back then - I think the markets were pretty
> > foreign to each
> > other.
> There never really was a crossover.
There may not have been a crossover of manufacturers, but there was
pretty clearly a customer migration. I watched it happen - and my
career followed, going from big iron to minis to desktop
workstations. So far I've managed to avoid anything that looks like MS
OS support, and have no plans at all to change *that*.
The original comment was about standardization and the PC market.
Most of the people playing with PC hardware I knew in the early days
had done the migration. They took incomparability between manfacturers
as a given, and they didn't push for any kind of standardization.
> Gotta look at the big mainframe producers and see where they are
> now. Where's Cray? Last I heard they were part of SGI, who was
> also going in the tank over their line of NT based workstations
> (what the hell were THEY thinking?). IBM's Mainframe
> business... how many ES/9000s do you see being sold each year?
> They've moved to the AS/400 and RS/6000 lines. And Digital? Now a
> division of Compaq, simply because Compaq couldn't build a high end
> machine to save their life and didn't know what good customer
> support was. Then there was Unisys and their Clearpath line, which
> may still exist, not really sure. But I know they've cut out their
> consumer PC division, and used a lot of resources to build the new
> high end servers that have CMP technology. What about Data General,
> or Wang, or ...
Yup - if your customers migrate and you're not selling where they're
going, you're going to be in trouble.
> The mainframe is getting to be like a classic car from the 50s. Nice
> to look at, the new generation Oohs and Aahs over it, but no one
> really wants to touch it for fear of breaking it and no one wants to
> support it any more due to the costs of replacement parts, etc. (not
> that mainframe parts were ever cheap...)
Actually, mainframe replacements aren't very expensive any more. You
don't buy mainframe, you buy a stock Wintel box with a 3081 - or
whatever - on a card, and run your legacy (industry jargon for
"working") systems on that.
> Which reminds me... has anyone seen the new Intel vision of what a
> consumer PC is going to be? It's basically a stack of boxes, like an
> Aztec temple, each one holding a component or two. Foundational box
> holding the motherboard, processor and memory. Next step up holding
> the DVD-RAM drive, followed up the next steps containing the HDD, the
> other removable media drive (looked like a Zip drive), and the top
> being the control and I/O panel with all of the ports on top. Gone
> are your PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, replaced by USB. Gone are
> your serial and parallel ports, replaced by USB.
Ok - what's the drive interconnect? Are they actually running IDE to
external boxes?
> This is what they want the PC to be once the IA-64 hits mainstream.
> Which basically means that when the Itanium gets out there and into
> the hands of more than the technophiles, nearly everything that we
> have now is going to be obsolete.
Actually, it all already is, in the sense that you can buy
newer/faster/better hardware. For instance, I moved my primary printer
(an LJ5M) to USB to attach an old color printer, and the I/O numbers
on the postscript benchmark went through the roof. I assume that if I
had a real USB printer, it'd be even better. So if I replace the
antique color printer that's on the parallel port, I'm going to buy
USB, and disable the parallel port in the BIOS.
> Thank you Intel!
Have you forgotten that Apple has already done that - and apparently
survived? Personally, I like going to USB for that stuff, as it frees
up IRQs, which are a precious commodity. I'll be replacing my ISA
hardware with USB by attrition, though.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.
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