Re: [9fans] General question about hosted interfaces

["Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>]

geoff@collyer.net wrote:
> So to have a relatively stable peripheral environment one would need
> to (somehow) standardise buses (internal and external), controllers
> and their interface protocols, and the protocols between the
> controllers and the actual peripherals.

Yeah.  Actually only the plugging interface needs that level of
standardization.

> But then the world would change around us; people want greater
> speed or utility ...

Indeed, and good engineers know how to design in advance to
accommodate change.  I deliberately pointed to SCSI as partway
there, because it has been able to evolve in that way without
losing support for older SCSI devices.  Note that unlike most
contemporaneous interfaces, SCSI used a packet protocol.

The fact is that people really do want plug-and-play, it's just
that they don't really have it available today.  USB devices
aren't truly plug-and-play, because a device-specific and
platform-specific piece of driver software must be installed.

> I cope by stock-piling cheap supported controllers and trying to
> simplify hardware configurations.

Yeah, if we want to run Plan 9, currently we have to do that.
I am not satisfied at having to dig up junk hardware.  Ideally,
I should have one workstation that can be used for all workstation
tasks, be it interactive 3D games or software development.  That
workstation ought to be as nice as possible within my budget.

> ...  The ATI Xpert 98 cards were good for a while, but now it's
> hard to find any of them that don't have the Rage XL engine, ...

That has been my experience, too.  Beware "value editions".

> ...  38,000 lines in /sys/src/9/pc/*.c vs. 11,700 in
> /sys/src/9/bitsy/*.c.

How much of that is due merely to the fact that the "Bitsy"
hasn't yet had much time to evolve?