From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Thu,  4 May 2000 13:57:37 +0100
From: Digby Tarvin digbyt@acm.org
Subject: [9fans] (the potential) new release of Plan9, i386 only?
Topicbox-Message-UUID: a5bf2b1c-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <20000504125737.zmeLAx90BrHkQzJe6-BXFPk0KJv5Mk5yVRkS_Ybub5Q@z>

> >>machines and the *86 machines, ie. is a sparc5 better or worse than a
> >>pentium? Could you give me some guidelines?
>
> PCs have typically made it easier to attach a wide range of gadgets to them.

Interesting statement. The difficulty of adding hardware to PCs is one
of the things I hate about them.

<soapbox mode>
The IDE interface present on most PCs has always been far less
flexible than the SCSI interface used on most other systems, with
all the nonsense about having to know the physical geometry of the
drive and the perpetual problems and workarounds required do deal
with larger disk capacities, not to mention the small number of devices
supported, only one initiator per bus, and the assumption of all devices
being disk type devices.

Then when you move on to the bus structure, ISA was a nightmare to
design for, with the continual problems of dealing with clashing
port numbers and limited interrupt structure. VME had its problems,
but they always seemed very minor compared to PCs.

EISA and PCI have helped, but PCs still seem to be more awkward
than alternate architectures which avoid the Intel kludges, and
all the improvements are only closing the gap. I still feel that
the PC is trailing in everything except price/performance, which
is more a result of volume and market dominance than superior
design.

As far as I can see, the only sense in which PCs have been easier
to add gadgets too is that their market dominance has led to
hardware vendors dedicating themselves to supporting PCs in
spite of their deficiencies, and at the expense of support for
other systems.

Lack of driver support is also a problem for non-Microsoft operating
systems. At least on other architectures, manufacturers tend to
accept the need to document their products to allow third party
drivers to be written. On PCs, the resources go into developing a
Windows driver, and having developed that the manufacturer typically
decides that hardware documentation is not needed, and even worse,
details are concealed as a trade secret...

Admittedly Apple and Sun have both produced machines that provided
little support for plug in cards. But I don't see that as any different
to the situation with notebook PCs which have similar restrictions.

</soapbox mode>

Sorry - I just couldn't let that pass :-)

Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk