Re: IBM

The message <4476D7BF.F7D1CD30@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Johannes <johs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:



marcfinnwilson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

"The trick was to make a BIOS that performed
the same functions without actually looking inside the chip. This was
done
using "clean room" engineering starting from a blank ***. The
engineers
had to sign a declaration that they had never seen or come across any
internals
of the IBM BIOS." i.e. reverse engineer

Hehe. IBM tried to claw back the PC standard by introducing the Micro
Channel
bus (MCA) and licence its use. I've seen MCA cards and they do look
very swish.
However, the industry responded to this with the EISA bus. IBM was
much about
style and you often saw an elegant IBM PC as a backdrop for TV
interviews with
(supposedly) clever persons :-)

The PS/2 range with their MCA only expansion slots (and a proprietry
pinout version of 72 pin simm memory) was IBM's biggest mistake. IBM
were onto a loser by then since their origional concept had taken on the
form of an unstoppable "Frankensteins's Monster" due to the huge
investment in the AT standard by both the manufacturers and their
customers.

Anyone who'd made the error of buying a PS/2 machine, very soon
realised what a horrible mistake they'd made and very quickly dumped
them in favour of an industry standard AT clone with industry standard
ram slots still sporting ISA slots with, perhaps, VLB slots and, later
on, PCI slots.

I still feel the MoBo industry have been acting prematurely in doing
away with the ISA slot altogether. There must be plenty of audio
enthusiasts who are well pissed off by the need to hang on to an older
system just be able to digitise their vinyl collection via the line in
on a sound card that _doesn't_ clip in the analogue buffer before it can
generate FSD clipping in the ADC converter (as all PCI soundcards do).

I have had to relegate my expensive SB AWE 64 Gold (ISA) card to an old
slot 1 Motherboard based system box and hate the fact that my nice new
XP2500+ system comes nowhere near the quality of synthesis that was
available in that card when it comes to playing any midi files. :-(

Aside from this latest mistake in MoBo design, the clone industry has
kept the IBM PC standard alive by _evolving_ it into the high
performance product it now is, rather than by catastrophically
introducing the new interfaces as an all or nothing upgrade. It's the
backwards compatability that has been the real strengh of this
particular product line.

--
Regards, John.

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.