Slashdot Mirror
Legacy-Free PCs
JeffM2001 writes "InformationWeek is running a story by Fred Langa which gives an overview of the ways to create a true-Legacy-free computer. Finally we can have a PC not based on twenty year old technology." Update: 04/07 17:34 GMT by T : Pages past the first one of this article seem just to loop; here's the printable version, which has the whole article in one go.
I'd rather A free legacy pc any day.
-s
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
BeOS?
That was classic intercourse!
So what does it run if not an x86 processor? :)
Then install an OS based on Unix. 30 year old tech.
I have to wonder how they expect to have legacy-free machines while there are still people running around with huge phallic vibrating instruments? Don't they understand that the legacy penetration via such instruments will always affect the slashdot crowd, mostly as a posterior means of entry into the market? Those who are not endowed with anterior dorsal appendages will suffer from the lack of size standards!! Slashdot readers need not suffer any more such shrinkage!!
If you use e-mail, the web, etc., it's not legacy free. E-mail, at this point, can be considered a legacy system. Not to mention IP... 1981. Not new. I don't think that legacy-free PCs (or anything else) will truly exist for a long time.
the link to the article is broken and should be THIS
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
It seems as though the PC crowd has this obsession over the worry that someday they might have to use something which is twenty years old or more. Thus, in mainstream machines, you'll see things like ISA slots or floppy drives still. Heck; the whole x86 architecture is basically just bolt-on instructions to the previous architecture, with a lineage going all the way back to the Intel 4004. And while some of the backward-compatibility feats they've pulled are nothing short of miraculous, our blind insistence on backward-compatibility is at the point where it's holding back the state of the art more than advancing it.
This is the sort of thing emulation and hardware adapters were made for.
The URL supplied doesn't quite work. As it has a trailing slash when you access the page and click next page it goes to http://www....com//2 however their script doesn't like this so it serves up the front page again. To fix it delete the trailing backslash
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Down with PS/2! Down with RS232! Down with ECP+EPP! Down with floppy disks! Down with ATA/PI! Down with DB15/Analog!
Let's hear it for flash media formats, DVI, USB, SATA, and Firewire!
I'd prefer that my next motherboard contain only modern I/O ports. I wish that more vendors offered them, but they don't. The ones that do, do so at exorbitant prices.
If only we could RTFA... can't get past the first page of it, myself, and there are apparently 8 in there somewhere.
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
Well I guess that using a c64 with a tape deck just isnt recent enough for people.
I guess the navigation controls at the bottom of the page used to move between pages of the article are running from one of those new computers with no BIOS that don't suffer from stagnation or stability.
You can't handle the truth.
It's got too many slashes preventing you from changing pages. Remove the slash at the end and it will work right. Here's the correct link:
0 003
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030404S
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The links for the pages of the article are a little retarded. If you want to view a certain page number, enter the number after the last "/".
Just a little helpful advice.
I still like my 9-pin serial port, you insensitive clod!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
**begin old man ranting**
Back in my day we would kill for those Legacy based PC's, I remember a time where the i386 and 8mb of ram would be some fancy stuff, but nooooo... these days all you whipper snappers want is speed and pretty colors on your pretty little flat panel doohickies, well I remem...
<old man status?="snooze mode"> zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
</status>
**end rant**
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
all the same
:-(
1) pneumatic tires
2) internal combustion engine
3) suspension
bla bla bla
I don't think flying cars will ever get here
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
If people keep building machines like this, soon the machines will start building us, and using us as a source of power.
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
am I the only one having issues getting to the other pages of the article? For some reason, no matter which page I click I never move off page 1. Tried 2 different browsers, page is b0rked.
ANYWAY, I fail to see why legacy is such a bad thing. Just because it's 20 years old doesn't mean it needs to go away. Using this guy's philosophy, Ethernet is 30 years old, and obviously that's a bottleneck compared to newer technologies like token ring and Turbo Arcnet. UNIX is over 30 years old, and obviously it's a bottleneck compared to the young NT kernel.
Just because the PC's core is 20 years old, I'm not sure why we suddenly need to drop everything and change it.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
They are talking about eliminating the BIOS and serial, parallel and ISA devices.
I have a laptop (Toshiba 5100) with none of the aforementioned stuff.
Everything is controlled by ACPI.
I run Mandrake 9.0
I did have to patch the kernel myself, but it does indeed assign IRQs properly, and generally it just works.
Guess what I had absolutely 0 problems with: yes, Windows XP.
My point is that when you buy a non-legacy free motherboard you have a CHOICE of using usb / usb2 / firewire rather than serial parallel and ps2 but if you get stuck with an OS that does not really support it, well, you are truly stuck!
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
The 2000 is a great machine, providing that you can get by with the software that Tandy has engineered for the 2000. The 2000 is one of the fasted machines on the market today, has fantastic 640x400 CGA color graphics and don't forget the 720K 5.25" floppy disk drive. If you are looking to put a "standard" ISA card in this machine, forget it... no ISA slots, just Tandy 2000 slots. This machine along with it's version of DOS 2.11 makes it an excellent state-of-the-art personal computer. So THERE! Who needs an upgrade?
Yea, wasting hundreds of dollars per desktop is a real way to optimize business. Opening yourself up to more security flaws, locking yousrself into stricter licensing schemes, and forcing yourself to upgrade your hardware to deal with the bloat of the new OS are all real productivity and performance enhancers.
Repeat this process until someone in upper management gets hit with a clue stick, or your company has had to lay off half the IT staff just to upgrade to the amazing Windows 2003 .NET server with integrated XP/PLUS! desktops and Office 10 for just under $500,000.
Ok, if we want to get a legacy free pc, lets start with the basics. First that x86 instruction set, yeah, that's gone, can't use that old technology anymore. Next, we need to change up the power supply, don't think they've made any serious advancements in those lately. Now we need a firewire mouse. Why spend less and get the same results, when you can get a mouse hooked into your machine at 450 Mbits/s. Oh and almost forgot, get rid of those pesky cd-rom drives, as that old cd technology seems to be over the twenty year mark, just last year.
seriously, some times legacy is a good thing. Just think you do away with that pesky floppy drive, and then try to use your smartMedia on your schools antiquated computers. Not gonna work. Anyway, just my 2 cents.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The term "legacy system" is now used to describe any piece of technology which actually works as opposed to "modern system" which describes things that might work.
I'm stil puzzled by the presence of "sys rq" "print scrn", "break", "scroll lk" buttons. Is there anybody using them?
That said, if you buy a unit that can boot into OS9 you can run just about everything Apple has ever made (even Apple I hardware and software) and just about everything any third party has ever made through some sort of adapter (PCI to nubus adapters even exist) - I don't know of a single thing other than the previous () hardware or software (natively or through emulation) that can't run on dual boot Mac.
All that said, the newest Macs are completely legacy free with both code (even though underpinned with BSD/Unix) and hardware. (USB/Firewire/Bluetooth/WiFi/Etc)
I don't know of any PC that can use EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVER MADE for the brand.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
At many of these sites, you can get the full article on one page by selecting the "print this article" option. That works fine in this case and makes it much easier to read.
I believe the author was talking about a computer who's users could handle more than one mouse button... and that could run 3rd party software. ;-)
(I know, I know, I got reeled in, but I can never resist Mac trolls.)
foe me, freak me.
_AND_ they run Mac OS-X!
"What a country!"
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
- legacy 80x86 CPU remains in place
- legacy IDE controller registers (themselves based on earlier Western Digital MFM and ESDI
controllers) are still in place (although the cable might be serial ATA)
- legacy BIOS emulation layer to allow DOS-type OS's and utilities run on legacy-free machines
Don't get me wrong, this is one of many possible steps in the right direction. But none of these steps are particularly new or innovative. Heck, look at the way EISA 80x86 config utilities could run on DEC Alphas that didn't have an 80x86 in them, *that* was innovative (although again in a legacy-compatible way).Our houses, cars, TVs, ovens, toasters, etc... nearly everything we use on a day-to-day basis... contain "legacy" technology.
Our medical profession uses techniques that are centuries old. Why? Because they work.
Merely because something is old does not mean it's bad. My old external modem still works and is as fast as any USB modem. How am I harmed by using this "legacy" technology for faxing? How is my computer slower?!
There are times when old technology should be replaced by new technology. But, merely because it's old does not mean it's bad. We shouldn't be upgrading simply for the sake of it.
What used to be called "time tested" is now called "legacy". We live in a disposable culture where if it's a couple years old, it's worthless. No wonder our music sucks. It took the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who years before they make their best works.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Oh and by the way, to the person who coded the links at the bottom of the page, you're fired
but the floppy should have been shot long ago :)
:) My USB HP CD writer may be useless under any Apple operating system (c'mon HP, can't you write an OS X driver, for old tim's sake?), but it floats freely among and works well with all my linux machines. It's slower than the internal burner I have in another machine, but actually gets a lot more use because of the convenience.
I used to deride the really aggressive "legacy free" systems as actually being "planned obsolescence systems." --> "Hey, look, Mrs. Smith, your perfectly functional system is now really *dated* and it makes you look like a %$#@ *spinster!*" or, more likely, "Gee Biff, I know we've done a lot of business in the past, but as I look around your offices I see that your employees are still using technology from *six months* ago. I think this round, we're going to have to select a supplier with a little more technological currency!" [condescending chuckle]
However, now that firewire and USB (and USB2, and FirewireInfinityOneBillion) are well established (and a pretty decent trade in accessories has emerged), I find that even a lot old peripherals I resent the new ports for "taking away" again work fine again. My AT keyboard goes through an ATPS/2 adapter, and then through a PS/2 USB adapter. IT's ugly, but it works.)
What I most like about the "legacy free" approach is that it tends to encourage external peripherals, which I like
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"[T]he Grail of many hardware engineers has long been a totally "legacy free" PC that can employ only fully modern, state-of-the-art, high-speed components and architectures. Such a PC would be faster, more compact, more reliable, and less expensive, as well as easier to manufacture and maintain."
<sarcasm> Yes, because we all know that new technology is automatically more reliable, smaller, less expensive and easier to manufacture/maintain. </sarcasm>
Reading through it more I see that what he's pushing for, EFI, is stored on "a special reserved area of the hard drive."
Errrr... Right. Can anyone else see some problems with that last bit?
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
...is not the keyboard ports or RS-232 or floppy drives or BIOS or any of the other things he mentions in his article.
I want a saner interrupt system. We're still using the same 16 interrupts they introduced with the PC-AT, with a little bit of PnP gloss over them. And most systems seem to have certain IRQs reserved away for their respective devices, so you can't use them-- don't have a floppy drive? Well, it'd be nice to let the PnP stuff use that IRQ for something else, but on many systems, you can't. And in a world where ever processor has a math-coprocessor _built in_, what's the point of reserving IRQ 13 for it? (Yes, the current design of Pentiums and Athlons require it. But _why_?)
Building a completely legacy free PC is pretty unlikely at this juncture, because the underlying architecture simply hasn't changed...
-JDF
A quick summary:
Serial, parallel, PS/2 (keyboard/mouse) ports are being replaced by USB.
Internal busses are moving from parallel to serial. While moving fewer bits at a time, they don't have to synchronize between the lines, so the overall speed is much higher. Hence, ATA->Serial ATA and PCI->PCI Express.
The traditional BIOS is being rethought.
You seem to have a very narrow understanding of freedom. The Press is Free from Government censorship, but they are not Free from popular distaste. No one guarantees that a newspaper or television station that people don't like will continue to find sponsors or exist. Nor does it guarantee that other companies will do business with them. Should they still have legal protection from hackers? Yes, of course, but should companies be forced to do business with them? Hell no. Al Jazeera is about as unbiased as FOX News.
Some silicon is taken up with backwards compatibility.
Firstly, we have the real mode compatibility that we'll probably keep until the death of the x86 architecture. Even the 64 bit generation chips have 16 bit compatibility mode. We could simply use an entirely different CPU, so this is not a big problem.
All 3d cards can still work in the low res 16 colour graphics modes, and have a large part of the original VGA chipset effectively grafted on to the chip.
People (including myself) constantly note that Macs and other non-PC designs are much more reliable than Wintel PCs.
All theology aside, there is a good reason for that; the other designs don't have to cope with the odd possibility that someone will try to install a twenty year old piece of hardware or a 15 year old piece of software on it - or more likely, a brand new piece of hardware that still uses twenty year old design guidelines.
The PC's ability to accept that vast array of cheap hardware is it's greatest strength but is also the biggest obstacle to reliability and performance the PC has.
Clear, Dark Skies
it'll be a legacy PC itself (before you even finish building it).
"Finally we can have a PC not based on twenty year old technology"
Who would buy a computer without a keyboard?
Does anyone know if EFI is an OpenFirmware implementation? If it isn't, we don't want it! At the risk of sounding "with the crowd", OpenProm and other OpenFirmware implementations are so much nicer than all PC-BIOS concepts I've seen to date. Add a simple psuedo-GUI shell in front of the prompt, and you'll make users happy. Besides, your average user doesn't want to play in the BIOS anyway. But for those of us that have *real* networks to work off of, and have real needs in OS installation and hardware maintenece, nothing is better than OpenFirmware systems.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Use http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030404S0 003/2 to get to the second page. Replace the "2" at the end with the page you want to see next.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
I thought the entire idea of being free of legacy was that you didn't worry at all about being compatible with what used to be, but here he is talking about the next huge step in moving away from PCI is going to a new, faster, 100% compatible PCI. In fact, he does that all over the article. This is the OLD technology. We still use the same technology, even though we switched technologies several times and use a different one now, but look, the cords look similar! Now we have a new technology, but it's not LEGACY-FREE! We should use this new, spiffy, compatible, LEGACY-FREE method that's written in C, the easiest highest-level programming language! That way things'll be faster and cheaper!
or that's how it reads to me. A long, detailed argument why Intel should dominate our PCs of the future.
Aren't they, like, 30 years old? Can we REALLY do without those? ;)
You are not the customer.
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lame text to get past the lame compression filter please ignore this apparently the filter doesn't like so many urls having alot of common text shit i hope this is enough
Am I the only one having issues getting to the other pages of the article? For some reason, no matter which page I click I never move off page 1. Tried 2 different browsers, page is b0rked.
ANYWAY, I fail to see why legacy is such a bad thing. Just because it's 20 years old doesn't mean it needs to go away. Using this guy's philosophy, Ethernet is 30 years old, and obviously that's a bottleneck compared to newer technologies like token ring and Turbo Arcnet. UNIX is over 30 years old, and obviously it's a bottleneck compared to the young NT kernel.
Just because the PC's core is 20 years old, I'm not sure why we suddenly need to drop everything and change it.
Come to think of it, I have been using both a usb keyboard and mouse since Mandrake 8.2 on Abit boards with varying chipsets (but usually VIA KT333).
You sure you was using your computer thingy right?
TWAT
No old technology, eh? How'd they obviate the use of electricity?
The OS reached a stage of perfection with UNIX.
Really, it is very hard to improve on it. I think the Starship Enterprise runs OpenBSD myself.
So - it is no big deal when the non-legacy computer runs the old OS.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Kinda ironic to see Intel pushing 'legacy free' systems... as if the 8086 instruction set weren't the biggest legacy technology affecting the PC market. (Yes I know x86 assembler has its defenders, but really, if you started from scratch today and knew what you were doing, you'd come up with something rather better.)
I think the standard definition of a legacy system is one that is currently installed and working... legacy shouldn't necessarily be a pejorative term. There are good and bad legacies.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I've used EFI, it's used on IA64 and other systems today. EFI is a ROM-based mini-OS that can bootstrap other OSes off a network, a CD or, for example, a special boot partition on a HD.
This is a Good Thing. It let me edit the lilo.conf when I had an otherwise unworking IA64 Linux box...
Clear, Dark Skies
You are obviously not a geek! How are you going to attach various home-brew devices to your PC? And what kind of modem are you going to use in case your DSL/Cable is broken? A Winmodem????
How does the existence of a serial port hurt you anyway? The only kind of PC legacy that really needs to be dealt with is the BIOS. Give me a LinuxBIOS with a good toolset. Everything else is just cosmetics.
uh.... legacy free is not very good for linux, if you think it is, then buy a new toshiba laptop and try using linux with the ACPI crap on those machines and not being able to get into the bios to turn off plug n play...
I refuse to believe that legacy free is half as an important concept as people make it out to be.
What the hell does legacy free mean anyway? No floppy drives? No ISA slots? Who decides what legacy is, apple has pretty much decided for their consumers that floppy drives are worthless, forcing them to buy them from 3rd parties. Is this really a good thing, I don't think so.
...and therefore does not, apparently, understand the reasons why not having a BIOS is an awful idea. Can you say, "machines that are locked into using only one OS?" "Microsoft Palladium inextricably inside?" "Machines crashing on boot due to crufty C code in ROM?" "Viruses that can make the hardware utterly useless... even more so than the Chernobyl virus?" Sure you can. The idea of a BIOS isn't a bad one just because it was invented many years ago. It's a classic concept that just works. And it's one of the reasons the PC architecture has been so successful and long-lived.
So, exactly what is biased about FOX news - are they biased towards the truth/facts?
I would qualify the opposite and say CNN and CBS are biased towards the left and towards misinformation for ratings.
This is far from a new trend. I remember a few years back (around 1998 or 1999, IIRC), legacy-free PC were all the rage. Compaq, among other, had line of business PC branded as "Legacy-free" (no ISA, PS/2, serial, parallel, etc). As to what goes around ...
:wq
In contrast, EFI is written in C, the world's most popular high-end programming language, and EFI isn't space-constrained because its data resides in a special reserved area of the hard drive.
WTF?
Also, to continue onto the following pages just add the appropriate page number to the end. For example, page 3
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
It seems to me that this "great new idea" from intel for a bios replacement including a programming enviroment, boot interface, etc. has been Sun, Apple and many other company's harware for a long time: open boot prom.
the article isn't talking about some new, great system that's going to revolutionize computers as we know them. it's referring to how we've outgrown certain technologies and how they've evolved into other things.
ie: ISA to PCI
PCI to AGP
serial to ps/2 to USB
etc.
the modern box really isn't "legacy-free". it's just evolved. it's not like a lot of physical difference between ISA, PCI and AGP cards. they all interface with the motherboard in basically the same way: they plug into slots in the motherboard and communicate through a series of pins. same thing with SCSI, IDE, EIDE etc. a couple ribbon cables and maybe a controller card.
while the tech involved in computers has grown by leaps and bounds, we're still using the same underlying concepts. I think the author just wanted to use "legacy-free" because it sounded like the cool buzzword of the week.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
I don't know in what vein you meant that, but it is in general its a worthless thought.
A legacy free OS is about as useful as a legacy free automobile. There is this thing called evolution which is how tools, machines, and software develop. Because of evolution you can easily look at a modern tool and compare its lineage to an old tool.
For example just because you can compare a modern laser cutter with a sharp rock some one used a five thousand years ago doesn't mean the new technology it worthless or even the same because it serves the same function.
Linux(the OS based on 30 year old tech) is NOT 30 year old tech. That's a stupid arguement to make. Fundementals don't change and throwing away 30 years of knowledge would be foolish.
In recent news...
Scientists have announced that they have successfully created a legacy-free lifeform. Says Dr. F. Stein, "No longer do we have to be encumbered by a basic design that is 3.5 billion years old! With the latest developments in DNA design we have broken the ancestral stranglehold." When asked for more details, Dr Stein continued: "Our most challenging task was to get away from the old-fashioned and frankly inefficient bilateral quadrepedal model (OF/FIBQM) and move to a new design. I call it: the four-legged chicken. Drumsticks for all the family!"
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
I got to read the whole thing, by asking it to print and reading that as opposed to trying the links. Even so, I did not understand what his point was. Is it just to make pcs cheaper? I have no love of the floppy drive, but how does not having one, and saving $5, make my computer any better? Maybe smaller? Whats wrong with something that is old, as long as it works? I am all for throwing out some stuff, but I love my rs232, for programming, it is so choice.
Careful with this, folks.
During the last months, whenever news about Palladium or any other DRM system that required hardware support appeared, a common answer was: "so what? As long as we have our legacy motherboards, HDs, etc., we'll be fine. They can't force us to buy new DRM-enabled hardware".
Well, now they can.
Imagine that Microsoft decides that their next version of Windows requires hardware support from this new EFI standard that Intel is pushing. And imagine that EFI carries with it a DRM system.
And what if you are using Linux? Oh yes, it will certainly boot in a new EFI PC. As long as the developers sign a NDA.
Basically, the entertainment industry has an interest in seeing all the PCs obsolete and replaced with DRM-enabled hardware, and this "revolution" is their golden chance. Not that replacing obsolete technology isn't a bad thing, but I'd be very wary of anything "they" try to sell us under the cover of being "innovative, cheaper, efficient, modern"... (have you read the first page of the article? It sounds like a hype piece from Intel itself).
Legacy support is the only thing that keeps the likes of Palladium and DRM out of the hardware. If PC manufacturers were to truly abandon all backwards compatibility, it would be nearly impossible to run Linux, as the manufacturers would simply cater to the largest OS maker, namely, Microsoft. With Microsoft designing the hardware, you can bet that the BIOS would autodetect the OS, and if the OS couldn't be "verified", it would fail to boot the machine. (Compaq has actually done this - a few years ago, their machines running Windows NT server had hardcoded instructions which would abort loading Windows NT, unless the version was one distributed by Compaq. The reason was that Compaq charged more for WinNT at the time than Microsoft.)
Yes, I think that the old hardware can be a drag at times. But it's kind of nice to know that I can depend on a standard NOT controlled by any one company. I've still got a choice of OS, and I intend to keep it that way.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
it would be nice to start off with a clean slate but the questions you have to asks yourself is:
* is it necessary to overhaul the entrie system?
* how long should this legacyfree system be available until another legacyfree system becomes available making the preivous system a legacy system?
the current slow progess is better since there is never a true legacyfree system so gradually adding features to say the motherboard as is done today (like new chipsets and usb etc) is the way to go.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Although some of the system elements have been modified over time, almost everything in your PC is a direct lineal descendent of the IBM PC AT--a seminal design that still shapes PC architecture two decades later.
I wonder how this guy will take it when he finds out how 'old' the major parts of his car are. Or maybe we should break the sad truth about the ancient, out-moded tool called a 'hammer'. Face it, having an old design is not necessarily bad.
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
I set my computer up as a Legacy Free PC by disabling the serial ports, parallel port, ps/2 mouse, gameport & floppy controller in the bios.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
The article presents "Legacy" as being some sort of evil that needs to be dumped at any cost. And they seem to define "Legacy" as anything that was invented more than 10 years ago.
It just isn't true. Legacy support - backward compatibility - is a *good* thing, unless it meets BOTH of these criteria: A) it sucks, and B) it conflicts with a better standard.
They present PS/2 keyboard connectors as an example, as if there's something wrong with them, but PS/2 doesn't meet EITHER of these criteria: PS/2 keyboards work just fine (A), and they don't get in the way of me using another standard such as USB (B). So why not have a PS/2 connector? It lets me use my old-skool clicky IBM keybard, and people with USB keyboards can just leave the port unused. BFD.
This glosses over the *real* problem with legacy support: Antique architectures that keep getting dragged along even though they *are* inhibiting progress. And, I'll go out on a limb here - computers are hardly encumbered by legacy the way a number of other common devices are. The worst of the computer world comes down to: x86 is kind of archaic, but has been pretty successfully extended to keep up with the best of any competing architecture; BIOSes have a lot of old features that aren't really necessary any more, but newer designs of system boot firmware are just over the horizon.
Really, the software is far more legacy prone than the hardware: Windows (Still supporting 16 bit DOS and all its cruft); Linux (doing a fine job of working just like computers did 30 years ago, because it still works just fine.)
Compare this aganst other industries that have some *real* cruft: Telephones - ISDN could have brought us crystal-clear, crosstalk-free phone lines everywhere, through use of digital telephony, and included some much better data capabilities than legacy telephone systems allow. Cars - We are *still* using rubber-on-asphalt, gasoline-powered, manual-drive crap, because we don't want to force everyone to throw out their old cars and invest in a better form of transportation.
And then you get into the truly *insane* forms of legacy support: Music distribution. The United States government with it's truly out of date laws. Governments in parts of the world that have laws that are *far* older than the entire country of the US. 110 volt 60hz AC.
And they're bitching about having extra unused PS/2 ports?
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
My new box, taffer, has only one piece of legacy hardware... the floppy drive. Even that was only added under duress.
All the other crap (serial, paralle, PS2) is there, but disabled in the BIOS.
USB2.0, FireWire, SerialATA... sweet!
Good ol' geek pr0n.
- chrish
Thank you for explaining that, as it wasn't what the article stated.
It would appear that Mr. Langa needs to make sure he understands what he's talking about before writing about it.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
"There is this thing called evolution which is how tools, machines, and software develop."
Nope. Evolution is how LIVING THINGS develop - tools, machines and software are DESIGNED by PEOPLE. It's a subtle difference, but an important one.
That was classic intercourse!
So this dope wants to replace BIOS with Intel's EFI. Well first he obviously hasn't used BIOS in a while seeing that it dose have a neat GUI depending on the system vendor. Add to that the fact that EFI is legacy code...many vendors have been using it for at least ten years (Compaq, IBM, HP ect.) and its a nightmare, imagine your system not booting and you being unable to fix it any time you replaced a hard drive, that s what happens with EFI if you don't get a HD from the vendor.
"Take a look at this almost-20-year-old image... Experienced eyes will even pick out the BIOS chip, the battery backup for the BIOS, the RAM banks, the familiar-looking cables and electrical connectors, and more."
Given the resolution and size of the picture he's refering to, "Experienced" eyes must also mean super-human. I can make out the RAM banks, but the battery and BIOS chip?! In general, the battery's easy to find - but not here.
Lousy Smarch weather...
This is not my sig.
I'm a Libertarian, so I don't really view myself as to the right or to the left, but FOX sure seems to have a bias. I don't see how anyone can deny that. Al-Jazeera has a bias too. The news you choose to report/not report is part of bias, it doesn't mean you have to lie. It's about what you make important.
In what way does eliminating the old PC BIOS lock you into an operating system?
As if I wasn't running Linux on an EFI-based machine last month, and running Mac OSX on machine based on a cousin of EFI right now...
(Well, not right now, it's sitting next to me playing tunes while I type this on an XP box...)
Clear, Dark Skies
I link up charities with corporate donations of computers. The hottest machines in my inventory are P3-733 machines from IBM's NetVista line which are reasonably legacy free. Why won't they move? Nobody wants the things because they can't hook up their parallel printer or scanner, serial modem, etc, etc. They've just got 5 USB ports for hooking up externals. Yes, there are USB adapters for all of these things and I've tried to give them away with the machines but even then people look too skeptical at such an obviously deficient computer that it doesn't even have a printer port. If you could wave a magic budget wand and replace every component at the same time then these new legacy free systems rock. Otherwise there aren't many takers. Sad, but true. No, you may not have one; I can only redistribute them to a 501c3.
Flash Memory is no longer quite as precious as it once was. Having 32 or 64 megs of flash onboard would have a marginal impact on a motherboard's price. Why put this data on the hard drive? WTF happens if I try to run the computer diskless?
okay so, if it has nothing that was invented 20+ years ago.
...
no keyboards, mouse's, GUI's, parallel ports, serial ports, PS2 ports, computer speaker, floppy disk drives, modems, ethernet cards, UNIX (sorry linux buddies... I use linux so this would be devastating for me.), DOS or DOS legacy apps (therefore no Win9X, Win 3.1), UNIX legacy apps, internet (It was created before 20 years ago), tape drives, CRT computer monitors, IDE, SCSI, ISA, ADA, C,
and probably more. (feel free to add to the list.)
Wow.. that would be a very impressive machine. I would love to see the interface for it.
~ kjrose
Ergo, it's a BIOS. Not a PC compatible BIOS, but still a BIOS. *g*
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
...the man who:
--trashed Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar;
--replaced Robert Tinney's stylish, elegant, light-hearted cover artwork with glossy pictures of products;
--transformed BYTE from an inch-thick publication with valuable technical content on every page into a buzzword-compendium for magazine managers who wanted to be able to rattle off the latest acronyms; and
--ran it into the ground.
Yes, a real authority.
Funny how, for instance, the incidents of friendly fire tend to get confirmed and reported on BBC hours before they get even an "alleged blue-on-blue incident" status on CNN.
Do you see reports and reporters on CNN, FOX or CBS asking tough questions about this war, why it got started, how it is conducted and what will come after the regime's collapse? Do the "in-bed"ded reporters make any distinction between themselves and the troops they're with? When BBC reporters talk about the coalition forces at least they talk about "them" not "us".
Supporting the troops is no excuse for bad journalism. Journalists' job is to be cynical, ask tough questions and look beyond what is said and shown in that Hollywood-designed briefing room at CentCom. I still chuckle at how Tommy Franks was for words when BBC World reporter practically called the footage they had been shown propaganda.
This is the part where some asshole will chime in with "But does it run Linux?"
Honestly though, this dumb question really has an underlying insight with the reason I run older hardware and everyone runs hardware that has geneology in legacy systems. It might not be the most efficient way to do things but it sure is the easiest and safest.
Take the obvious example cars. 100 and some odd years ago someone found a good way of putting a car together. Everyone took that concept and decided to build upon it. We could have started all over again, but that would have no guarentee of them being any good.
It may be better to build cars in the shape of a doughnut out of space age polymers. But I'll never know because I won't be the one driving them when the first batch of them explodes and kills everyone inside. I'll wait 5 years until they become tested legacy technology cars.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
Things That Are Not Cool:
1) Being a fag
2) Being friends with a fag
3) Supporting fag causes
4) Going to restaurants owned by fags
5) Reading books that have fags in them
6) Watching television shows that have fags as characters and those characters aren't dying of AIDS
7) Talking to people who like fags
8) Having a gay son
9) Eating food prepared by a fag
10) Going to a petting zoo and touching the gay animals 11) Owning a cat
12) Wearing makeup and not having a vagina
13) Having any type of "gender disorder"
14) Masturbating while watching Mad About You reruns on Lifetime
15) Having spikey hair
16) Fingering your own asshole
17) Thinking about a guy while you're taking a shit
18) Protesting against war or murder
19) Doing your grocery shopping at 7-11
20) Watching MSNBC
21) Bragging to people that you run Linux
22) Being a guy and trying on a bra
23) Not knowing some type of assembly language
24) Thinking Janeane Garofalo is funny
25) Stealing my car
26) Watching Oprah
27) Crying
28) Liking the Tampa Bay Bucs too much
29) Being molested by your father
30) Not knowing when I want you to shut the fuck up
Remember this? Well those are some pretty good reasons, aren't they? It's the same logic here.
You can't handle the truth.
yes...i also hate how my car still uses rubber tires to drive over "roads"...so primitive.
just because a technology is old and/or looks similar to how it used to a couple decades ago doesn't make it invalid. IMO the biggest culprit in computers is reusers. Companies know that a hard drive that can be an easy upgrade in a current PC is going to sell better than one in a magic new format. I know I dont have any slots in my case for a 4 inch wide hard drive or a place to plug in a 100-pin IDE2000 or whatever the hell they might develop. It would take far too much teamwork to change it all overnight, and i guarantee a lot of people would get angry as a result. Theres also the software factor...x86 has lots of software. True 64 doesnt have nearly that array. While I wouldnt mind swapping over (as a linux user) to a new chip such as a Dragon II or a PPC, there are a lot of people who cannot handle that change without an ordeal of large sizes.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
You know, it would be nice if middle schools would disallow access to slashdot
If you disallowed posts from the middle school, high school, and college kids, site traffic here would drop by 85%, I'm guessing.
Still worth a try, though...
... seems to have a qwerty keyboard.
No!
I wear Diapers!!! And I wear them for fun!!! I like to piss in them!
Does anyone else like PAMPERS 6?
Check out the FAQ here. Basically it's a little PC with nothing but USB ports, built-on VGA and LAN, and a power button, released in the K6-400 heyday. This was a response to the first iMacs. I bought one for $50 a couple of months ago, thinking I might make a nice little linux router and file server out of it.
That's when I found out that "legacy free" meant "software emulation requiring WinDrivers." I still haven't managed to get the goddamned thing to recognize the built-in LAN unless I put Windows on it and hunt down the drivers for a product that AMD would rather not admit it ever put out.
Screw legacy-free. I only realized after purchasing it that even if I'd managed to get this little bitch to work, I'd still have to sacrifice running my printer server off of it because it has no parallel port. If legacy-free means "replace all your hardware and peripherals" then I don't want any part of it, thanks.
GMFTatsujin
I've been considering buying an iBook for while. The only drawback that I see is that I might need to hook to a router or switch once in a while, but the iBook doesn't have serial ports. Is there a USB->RS232 adapter or something similar? For an Apple computer? This is a particular issue against legacy free computers, specially for IT people.
please excuse my apathy
Jeez, dude, couldn't you just say "Very few new motherboards have ISA slots"?
Clear, Dark Skies
which, last time I checked, is based on 20+ year old technology.
Yeah... like that USB -> serial adapter that works fine for generic use on my laptop, but blocks a 'BREAK' signal, making it COMPLETELY useless for resetting Cisco routers?
THAT is why I prefer a REAL serial port over some contraption somebody dreamed up.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Does anyone make an ISA slot adapter for PCI slots? Ie, something you can plug into a PCI slot that gives you an ISA slot? Is it even possible, or is there too much boot-time initialization required for the hardware and OS to see it as a valid ISA slot?
And make SURE it isn't based on SEMICONDUCTORS! Talk about ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY!
Odd, I have usb, firewire, 802.11b, and gigabit ethernet as main IO (all standard). I dont have a floppy. I have 2 CD burners, 4 drives totaling 400 gigs. AND My machine is more than 2 years old. I don't crash, My mouse has like 8 buttons (mx700), I don't have to worry about "we hate the users"-EULA that XP has. My OS is understandable to me, unlike linux, although linux is getting cooler and cooler each time I see it. The 2 year old machine is fast (dual 533) to me still, my games run great on the GF3 I put in here a long time ago. I HATE 1-button mice, but the mice that come with most machines are junk anyhow.
To sum up my thought, I wouln't give up my mac for a top-of the line PC right now, they might have a higher clock, but they can't run the programs I want to run, and won't make me as happy as I am with my 2 year old mac. Although if somebody wants to buy me a Dual 1.42 from apple, I would be in heaven.
I've only read through about half of the comments (threshold 1) and I see just about as many complaints about the links in the article as actual comments on the article itself.
Isn't Slashdot supposed to be "News for Nerds"??? Aren't Slashdot readers supposed to be among the more technically-inclined people out there? Supposedly so, yet they cannot even read one of MULTIPLE COMMENTS giving the solution or fixed link to the article (or heaven forbid figure it out on their own).
We often rant about Linux needing to be more simplified before taking over the desktop...but if a simple website can defeat the technically-inclined of our society, how is the layman ever to comprehend anything other than "[START] -- Click here to start".
I personally couldn't live without my parallel port. Never mind printers and scanners, but think of the Coffee for god's sake! (I personally controll my bedroom lights via parallel port)
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
with a lineage going all the way back to the Intel 4004
Not quite to the 4004, but there is a direct relic of the 8008 in your latest Pentium. The LAHF instruction (Load AH with Flags) loads some of the status flags into the AH register in a layout compatible with that of the 8008, 8080 and 8085 processors so that "LAHF; PUSH AX" produces the same result as the the 8008 instruction that pushes the A and Flags registers.
This instruction was added to the 8086 to make it possible to automatically translate 8085 code.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I can't say this more clearly: You can't access the BIOS. Only the OS can talk to the BIOS. But guess which OSs? Just Windows. Linux and BSD can't do it yet -- not correctly. All the IRQs appear as zero. See this Microsoft article. Then see the pissed off Linux users who bought Legacy Free laptops and found out that linux can't grok them, and what's worse, you can't access the BIOS yourself to fix it.
It's really a Dvorak keyboard...but Microsoft's pre-release Palladium is intercepting the graphic and changing it to a picture of a QERTY keyboard.
Install Mandrake on one set, then use a chrooted envoronment to install Gentoo on the other set. This has several advantages.
If the gentoo boot ISO doesn't support your motherboard, one or more of the kernel source ebuilds almost certainly does. The configuration of the working Mandrake kernel (and an lsmod to see what modules are installed, USB modules in particular) should go far in getting a Gentoo box up on that hardware.
I've done things like this for legacy-free tablets (which, while they work, don't have working digitizers yet under GNU/Linux, unlike the older Fujitsus which work flawlessly).
As an avid Gentoo user, both at work and at home, I've found the "two partition set" approach to be immensly helpful and useful.
Hope this helps!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
But I could be wrong.
Serial buses seem to big a trend in the PC industry.
Especially with Intel...
Serial ATA, PCI Express, Rambus, the PIV.
The whole plan seems to be, to take the complexity out of each device and then up the clock speed to insane levels.
I mean, for the longest time it was always a push for more parallelism in the PC bus... 8bit to 16bit to 32bit to 64bit.
Serial sounds cool in theory. Less wiring, cheaper products, more speed and expandibility. But what is the catch? There has to be one or we would have always been using serial buses?
Because that hard drive in your Mac is much different from the one in my legacy PC. Oh and so is that SDRAM. Open up a mac and open up a PC and you might be started to see that they are pretty much the same thing.
GMFTatsujin
As I see PC architecture has long ago taken the most difficult steps to cut off the legacy PC architecture. Don't you remember PC99 and PC2000?
ISA was the backbone of the PC and cutting every single relation to that old bust was the movement that PC99 did, years ago. ISA was so essential in the legacy PC architecture. From the keyboard controller to PC speaker, serial and parrallel ports, BIOS and even the sytem clock and timer were all devices connected to the ISA bus. Even inside the chipsets back into 90s these parts of PC were actually connected to the ISA bus. PC99 declared that every trace of ISA bus was not acceptable. Devices that could theoritically departure from the ISA bus, were removed from the ISA bus inside the chipset and the remainings were pushed over the PCI-ISA Bridge. IDE drives were nolonger connected to the ISA bus at all and hence could reach much higher transfer rates. Slower devices and ISA slots that could be found in late 90s motherboards were all on the other side of that Bridge and not on the system bus which was PCI.
In todays PC architecture, PCI has been pushed like ISA was pushed onced. The real bus that devices talk to each other on the mother board are now names like V-Link that connect the south and North chipsets. internally there is nothing similar to PC99 today, let alone ISA bus and also there is absolutely nothing ISA in today's PC (it's a requirement of the specifications actually!).
So why do we have yet Legacy Ports? First, Legacy ports != Legacy PC. We need ports because we have lots of preferals that use them. Yet internally the ports do not work the way they did 20 years ago and are not a requirement of the design. They are now features, not integral parts of the PC and if needed can be eliminated without any trace. PC back in 90 was orders of magnitued simpler than what it is today and complexity of today's chipsets reval the CPU itself. Those parts of the logic supporting 'Legacy Ports' is much less than %1 of the North+South chipsets...
The last thing legacy, one would complain, was the BIOS and its not far from being totally replaced very soon....
"The installed base--that is, the mass of existing, older, in-use hardware--acts like a giant speed brake on the computer industry because businesses and users are loath to give up older equipment that's still functional, even if newer designs would perform better or faster."
Just like this says, this is about the computer industry - not about the users, the businesses that rely on computers or the businesses that develop software. It's about those who sell new systems.
Hell, what commodity industry wouldn't like to see the current technology stack thrown out the window every 20 years ? The perhaps largest change we see in consumer technology today is the current TV systems being replaced with HDTV. That too is driven by the industry, but has only become possible with the emergence of cheap DVD technologies and crappification of cinema theaters that makes the home experience better than the cinema experience. Consumers now feel that HDTV will give them a meaningful upgrade.
I doubt that very few home users feel that the 20 year old legacy is a problem. In fact, most users realize that there is little need to upgrade the core of the computer any longer, since performance for their basics needs isn't improved with new hardware (gamers excluded).
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Anyone get the digitizer working under linux/X on the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4110 yet?
The digitizer requires a serial interface to the system to pass coordinate info through. Given that the legacy serial ports have vanished does anyone known where Fujitsu parked the data? I am guessing that they are buried as some device on either a USB bus or a PCI bus...
I borrowed a demo of this tablet with the Active digitizer for a week but couldn't find the interface in that time.
Also, linuxslate.org doesn't have it figured out yet. Any assistance on this would be greatly appreciated possibly with $.
Cya,
Dan
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
yes...i also hate how my car still uses rubber tires to drive over "roads"...so primitive.
Primitive is right - it's the 21st century, wheres my f***ing flying car ?
you mean the serial mouse i've been using is legacy?? damnit i'm behind the times a little it seems....
Your wallet is much bigger than mine, can I borrow it for a little bit?
You can go legacy free when you pry my prized ISA SoundBlaster 64 out of my cold fingers - none of the PCI replacements I've tried work properly under DOS games, or configure as nicely in Linux.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Damn punk-ass kids!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Do you think there is anything far close between say Pentium 4 and 8086?! Even their instruction set is not that similar any more. Yes, Pentium 4 to some degree supports 8086 but is not similar. With this logic you can say it's basically follows the rules of the physics that are billions of years old! So we'd better use another world's physics in the next processors!
I knew this would happen, my intention was to make a little joke, and point out that legacy is what make some things useful. But, of course, it just started a holy war. JIHAD!!!!!
I'll wait 5 years until they become tested legacy technology cars.
But will they run Linux?
Your car runs on 100+ year old technology. What makes the PC so special? Why should it enjoy advances faster than the automobile?
When I see mass produced cars running on hydrogen, I will consider worrying about legacy microcode.
insert carbon based fuel with air and explode it.
etch silicon and apply electricity.
Some things will never change(until I am long dead).
After all, the whole idea of a printable version is to serve up the content without all the blinking, annoying, distracting ads and other crap that adorn most sites.
While the printable version has more text content, it should have a much lower overhead on whatever dynamic content engine is being used to decypher cookies, do database lookups, and serve up the so-called targetted advertisements. All you've got is the header, the content, the footer, and perhaps a link back.
Link to printable version? YES!!!
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Why do we need a GUI on the BIOS configuration ? Why do we need to replace a simple, perfectly usable and debugged PC start up system ? I can think one major reason: they need to implement a fancy pants encryption and verfication system from the moment power hits the chip so that a secure computing environment (DRM) can be implemented. I think the GUI config tools are a lame marketing bullet point to make you think you need this stuff. I just don't get it.
Seriously, I never expected "Totally Legacy Free PC" to be something serious. I thought the article was going to be a joke. It's an idiotic premise. One doesn't say "totally legacy free" because it makes one look like an idiot. "Legacy free" yes. But you can't put that absolute "totally" on there, because its not absolute, but relatively infinitesimal.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
"The original base model IBM PC had only a keyboard port, a cassette port, a TV (yes--a TV, not a monitor), and a printer port as standard equipment, although you could add monitor, game, and serial communication ports as options."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The original 1981 IBM PC had a cassette and keyboard port. Period.
You had a choice (both at extra cost) of a monochrome/printer adapter (no bitmapped graphics but good quality text) or a CGA adapter (bitmapped graphics but lousy text). If you bought the CGA adapter, you had to buy a separate printer adapter if you wanted to print. You could (at extra cost) hook up an RF modulator to the CGA adapter to run a TV, but you couldn't do that with the mono/printer adapter.
Floppy drives and serial ports were also optional.
just because a technology is old and/or looks similar to how it used to a couple decades ago doesn't make it invalid. That was exactly my point. My company still uses serial port devices. Just because its an old standard, its not invaild. The serial devices we use still do what they where intended to do, why replace them? I don't mean that we shouldn't have forward progress, I just mean to imply that not all standard changes are progress.
Legacy free PCs... ...Wow...
Does this really mean we can actually, finally rid ourselves from Von Neumann's bottle neck?
I do NOT want my bios/firmware on the damn hard drive!!
Some computer manufacturers have done this in the past (compaq, ibm, hp), and it is the biggest hassle. If (ahem...when) your 1-year-warranty 120G drive goes bad you're going to be doubly SOL, you're going to have the additional hassle of having to install a new drive AND recreate all your firmware settings.
Plus, what about RAID? Are you going to have to have a non-raid device in your machine just for the firmware? Will this mean you will have to use onboard controllers? (e.g. no more slapping in the FC-AL card and just using the disks in the SAN). This sounds more like someone's idea of step 3 before
4) profit
than a remotely intellegent idea.
If I have any anticipated need for a burner when I'm traveling for more than a day or two, I can just pop the CD burner into a bag with a laptop (since I don't have a laptop with built-in burner). Can't do that with the internal drive.
... with my linksys + cable modem combination, sometimes the only way to restore a down connection is powercycling the router -- and I can't do that in the middle of burning an ISO. So, though I know network burning is possible, I swap a cable (takes 10 seconds) instead. Maybe one day ...
Also, I trust a direct connection more than I trust my network
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Replace with firewire or usb dildo.
Your USB dildo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
the thing that always cracks me up about pc's is that i never found one that runs without a video card. it's an easy trick adding to the BIOS some routing to pick a serial port and dumping info there if there is no video, just like 15 year old Sun hardware does.
anyway, my feeling is that the reactions here focus to much on certain "functionality" being legacy, while i would say that the way that functionality has been implemented is legacy. there is absolutely no problem in having regular serial ports. it's just how you do interrupt handling and physicial design that makes the current PC implementation crap.
well put. And I figured from the start that we were in the same vein of thought on this. it's like all the posts complaining about how anything running on a 486 running DOS should be upgraded, when in fact it already does its job quite well. Just because USB and FireWire are faster than my serial port does not make it better for its task. I dont recall the last time I cursed my dumb terminal for being too slow, and oh yeah...now I remember...I dont need my text terminal to go at several hundred megabytes per second.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Legacy Free is just another way to get the consumer to pay. As an example. I had 6 old PCs with perfectly fine ISA modems. When I bought the new PCs, they didn't come with (and we dropped our seller because of it) ISA slots, 3.5" floppies or CDROMs. Not to mention that it is nigh impossible to get driver disks anymore. So it takes me more time to create a build from scratch, and I need to buy new PCI modems, as well as 3.5" floppied and CDROMs.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I remember seeing a wave of such new designs back in the late 1980's. The problem was that all these "legacy free" designs often end up being more than a little proprietary in approach. If you wish to replace / upgrade components, you will have to go with the original PC vendor. That can eat up any advantages of the "legacy free" system.
Just let them. If the Americans want to live in a Nazi country, that's fine with me. People only seem to understand how stupid they are when their children are dead and their cities lie in ashes.
I have a decent amount of hardware that just simply Doesn't Work with most USB->Serial adapters. I have some that won't even work with ones that implement all control lines due to the nature of how they use the port. (i.e. directly twiddling the control lines in oddball ways. Think timing-critical devices like IR remote receivers.)
I'd rather pay $2 extra in the price of my machine for a proper 16550-compatible RS232 port that will work with anything designed for a serial port than $40 for a USB->Serial adapter that doesn't even work with half the serial devices I own. (Which is why I'm glad my Dell Inspiron 8200 has the damned port.)
And as an EE major - I will be very sad when parallel ports disappear completely, they're wonderful for misc. PC-controlled electronics projects. Again, something USB can do but not without a large investment in money and time.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Faster than what? Yes, yes, there are tons of folks who need to render earthquakes and predict meteor showers or look for aliens, but the rest of us don't need faster. More compact? Than what? Have you seen the size of the current notebooks? More reliable? This is the biggest freakin joke. When is the last time you had a hardware problem? Now, when is the last time you had a software problem? And, finally, less expensive. Do I even need to mention the $150->$300 machines at WalMart? Sure, you cut three dollars off the price of the computer. I'll be much happier when they've cut the price of LCD's by about 50%.
Another tool of the Dvorak vein, although less interesting. At least Dvorak can get you pissed off. This guy is just a retard, it seems. (I look at his picture and think 'Ding! go the fries') It's no wonder people bitch so much about turned down submissions.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Interesting that through it's eight pages the article goes pointing technology after technology that should have passed a way a while ago.
:-)
And, not so oddly, one could go pointing that each of these have actually passed away in
Apple Computer's "personal computers". Apple first brought USB to the mainstream, and knocked out it's odler system - ADB - at once. And ADB itself were already more advanced than they keyboard ands mouse interfaces still in use.
Floppies? also gone in 1987. Parallel ports? Don't make me laugh!
When it was time, the companny boldy changed the CPU architecture itself to RISC based machinnes, leaving behind M68K, also an architeture that has ever been far beyond anything x86 could ever be on a programmer point of view.
It was just because of market pressures taht APple had to adopt inferior x86 PC's teck like ATA, and PCI (ok, maybe not inferior to what Apple had at the time, but they could have done better than adopt a 33MHz standard in a time system buses where at 50MHz).
ANd if I point Apple as an example it's just because it is the sole survivor of the diversity of personal computers we used to have in the 80's. 0x86 PC's I count more as zombies than as survivors.
The IBM/Microsoft/Intel span who is the author of the artiucle should be put to rest in legacy hell, with the anacronismis he tries to point out, just for pointing out the prototype of the first IBM PC as "maybe as important as Bells' first Phone(...)", forgetting that Personnal Computers had been on their way for a lot more time.
Enough bashing for now.
-><- no
All the press likes to pick up the story "Extensible Firmware Interface will make the BIOS obsolete!" The fact is, EFI does not eliminate the BIOS. It is just a more complicated BIOS with a GUI. I'm not at all convinced that most people need that. I can do everything the EFI is supposed to do with just a boot floppy and without the trouble of flashing a motherboard EPROM. It sounds to me like Intel would like to capitalize on the kind of vendor lock-in IBM used to enjoy with a proprietary BIOS.
For great justice.
Legacy stuff gets killed, and its a shame. .060 thick steel that you could throw down stairs. Keyboards that you could pound on for years without breaking them. And who doesn't miss seeing "Insert disk 2 of 17" when installing software?
Gone are the days of cases made of
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
From the meme entry in the The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (via dict):
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
not to be pendantic, but if a Serial Port is NOT a "contraption that somebody (sic) dreamed up" that how exactly did it come into existence?
I have an IOgear PS/2 to USB adapter. Nice when it works both under Linux and Windows. However! The keyboard (IBM M' series) occasionally disappears, and one has to unplug the adapter and plug it back in for the keyboard to be seen.
In my opinion, the legacy of your typical desktop PC than IBM's PC/XT. Pentium has it's roots in the 8086? Try the 8080 or even the 8008. Does opening your desktop, with the motherboard and it's PCI slots with vertically mounted cards remind you of the original IBM XT or AT with it's ISA slots? Cast your mind back further--more than five years--and behold! (be patient, takes awhile to load)
Intel's move to making FXCH non-free is the first sign that they're trying to phase out x87 while being compatible. Essentially, that FPU is only there for compatibility reasons, and for modern apps Intel doesn't want you to use it - They want you to use SSE. (Note: You can use SSE without vectorizing your code. In the past this would not be of any benefit, but with the crippled x87 FPU, SSE is the way to go even when non-vectorized.)
As to other ports: I say leave em' on there. Due to the massive volumes involved, they only increase system cost by $5 or less for "the works" (2S 1P, both PS/2).
That means I can use my old AT&T keyboard (IBM Model M clone), new keyboards just don't "feel" right. Yes, there are PS/2-USB adapters, but they cost $20-30. $20-30 for one port when I could've gotten "the works" for $5 or less? I don't think so.
Same for my serial devices. Adapters that implement all RS232 control lines cost $30-40 minimum. I can get two onboard 16550s for a fraction of that price.
USB is nice, but for some operations it's massive overkill, and for those operations I want my nice cheap 16550s!
Without an RS232 port, 90% of Atmel's AVR microcontroller line can no longer be used for various PC-interfacing projects I have. The remaining AVRs are much more expensive, harder to obtain, and a bitch to work with.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I have a somewhat "legacy free" PC. That is, a PC with no PCI slots (or any kind of expansion slots). Everything is integrated into the mobo and the only means of expansion are two USB 2.0 ports.
Everything was fine and dandy until I decided to turn it into a firewall/gateway and realized that I can't just pop in a second $9.00 PCI nic.
So I ordered a USB ether adapter and hope that Linux will work with it, since I can't find any reference to it on the FreeBSD source.
No sig
Are you calling the Iraqis stupid?
Hint: you missed the tags...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Go google for 'unibody' Somebody did come up with a new way to build cars...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Which would you take?
Like you, I'd take "the works" for $5. USB->serial adapters with all control lines are $30-40 minimum, and even they won't even work with some serial devices.
By ditching legacy ports on a motherboard, you'll save a few bucks (less than $5 most likely, NatSemi SuperIO chips handle "the works" and are cheap - The most expensive one is $5.50 in 1k quantities and has serial, parallel, PS/2, 40 GPIO pins for blinkenlights/etc., and voltage/temperature monitoring.
Given that the above chip also handles non-legacy functions like system status monitoring, the cost of the parallel/serial/PS/2 ports is probably only $1-2 silicon-wise. $3 should cover the connectors if bought in quantity.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
a "theoretical maximum" doesn't increase over time.
The theoretical maximum of USB 1.x has not increased; it remains at 12 Mbps. However, the theoretical maximum of USB LATEST has increased from 12 Mbps in USB 1.x to 480 Mbps in USB 2.0.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What the hell is this article doing on frontpage news of /.? Is it just me or is this topic passe and pointless? I can't believe the massive attention and posts that are on this. *Sigh*. Now I remember why I don't read /. anymore.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
In post-apocalyptic earth, legacy systems build YOU!
Now there isn't anything really wrong with that except that fact that booting a PC isn't the most documented procedure out there. I don't know why, I think it has something to do with BIOS Engineers trying to keep a strangle hold on their jobs.. If you've done any modern assembly programming and then try to write a BIOS it's like a different world. It's totally retro, kind of freaky in ways.. Can't even map a modern flash or eeprom in to memory the way the chip comes out of reset, not enough addressability.
I got a few results from Google: usb serial adapter mac
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why the hell am I using light bulbs with filament in them? Why use light bulbs at all? And well the clothes I'm wearing have buttons...and that is like 1000 year old technology...does somebody want to make me a shirt that doesn't contain all this legacy technology? Seriously...if it ain't broke, don't fix it!!!
Dictionary.com:
Contraption n. A contrivance; a new-fangled device; -- used scornfully.
Contraption. Not, "something somebody dreamed up." You got an insightful for that? "Something somebody dreamed up" includes you (because we all know what your dad was dreaming about :P).
A Serial port is an interface device. A USB port is an interface device. A USB to Serial Port adapter is a contraption to connect two things together that weren't meant to. Like Clinton and the presidency. Got it? :P
(Jesus, I have a parallel port, why not a serial?)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
...doesn't run on "old fashioned" electricity or use an antiquated QWERTY keyboard or a clock based processor that processes only zeros and ones .... oh wait
one reason for the slow change is "the large number of customers with legacy ergonomic keyboards, optical mice, and trackballs" who won't want to switch to USB input devices until their older devices are no longer serviceable.
Seriously, with regard to legacy ports, there are a number of adapters out there. A user who *insists* on using a perfectly working 10-yr old laser printer with parallel port (rather than buying a new inkjet with overpriced ink) can get a parellel-to USB-cable. Similarly for keyboards and mice.
BTW, I've noticed that many routers with embedded print servers only have parallel ports! When will they do away with such antiquated technology?!?
Can you say placebo effect?
No way is plugging your keyboard in via USB rather than PS/2 improving things. Do you know how many signal conversions a signal from a USB keyboard goes through? Then all of the driver complexity needed to read that info? The latency through a USB connection is far greater than that through a PS/2 connection (which is pretty "low-level" and goes through almost no signal conversions whatsoever before hitting the PC's bus.)
"this makes a big difference for people who type at speeds above 2000 words per minute."
Maybe it would make a difference if you're typing that fast, but for anyone typing less than 197 wpm (the current world record according to http://www.greyowltutor.com/essays/typing.html ), PS/2 has more than enough throughput, and has lower latency than USB.
Did you know that one clustered computing project used parallel ports for one of their interconnects? Yup. Ethernet handled the bandwidth-critical stuff, but for some information latency was the bottleneck and not throughput, and they used a custom parallel-based scheme for that. Faster doesn't always mean better for the job.
Also, you don't have to use the legacy ports when you don't want to. But when you have to use a $40 USB->serial converter for some serial device, you'll wish you'd spent the extra $5 for "the works" as far as ports on your motherboard.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Because C programmers are so good at bounds checking.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
The non-legacy tech mentioned in the article is limited to tech that is created by Intel.
The article doesn't mention Firewire/1394, Hypertransport, Infiniband, Serial ATA, etc.
In other words, according to the article, "port" of the future is USB, the "slot" of the future is PCI Express, the BIOS of the future is EFI, so perhaps we should infer that the CPU of the future is Itanium 2.
Nevertheless, I don't mean to suggest that the article is intentionally biased toward Intel, since it doesn't really do a good or thorough job of promoting Intel-developed technologies. Perhaps the author just didn't think to research the new technologies which are in PCs that have been shipping for the past year.
Okay, so they want to put the replacement for the BIOS on the hard drive? Have they not talked to the legions of pissed-off Compaq users who's systems have become dead and useless due to a hard drive failure? Don't EVER stick the most essential low-level systems on the drives! Use flash RAM or some other periphial independant medium!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It's a well known, well used and probably patented business practice to re-brand unfashionable products. Hence, to create a legacy-free PC you merely have to re-brand the "legacy" interfaces and parts..
(1) BIOS
What does the BIOS do these days? It bootstraps the OS, initialises the hardware and runs a POST. It's written in a programmable FLASH memory chip. In other words, it's a Programmable Read Only Memory which bootstraps... a Boot PROM!
So, the new, legacy free PC now has a BOOT PROM instead of a BIOS.
(2) Serial Port.
This one's easy, it's a Low Bandwidth Serial Interconnect device.. or LBSI port.
(3) Floppy Disk
Another easy one.. Digital Flexible Disk.. DFD-RAM
(4) Parallel Port
Universal Parallel Bus.. UPB.
As you can see.. re-branding these old interfaces gives you a new, legacy-free PC!!!
This is only really half joking, really. There are still many uses for these old interfaces and components. Half the "legacy" part is really the implementation rather than the interface itself.
For example, the BIOS doesn't HAVE to be written the way it is currently, it's just that it is traditionally done so. The floppy disk doesn't HAVE to be limited to 1.44MB as the LS-120 drives showed (the problem this had was that it didn't look like a floppy disk at the hardware level for legacy software).
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Well my only problem with legacy free is no more old game port for MIDI purposes. Nowadays ya gotta buy a USB based MIDI unit that costs more then a bit more then the old gameport to midi cables. I play keyboards in a band and use Acid Music Pro 4 to control the keyboards from a laptop. Works rather nice. It just sux for most of the half starving musicians to have to put alot of money into what used to be really cheap. I'm at the moment saving up to get a USB based one just so I can upgrade my laptop to a modern set up.
I am one of the last people that wants to upgrade something that works well, but many of the legacy ports really don't and life would be better if they weren't on my computer (and even better yet if they weren't on my parents computers).
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I'd love to see a superior replacement for parallel ports for the average user. Network printers are better, but for individual users they are too expensive.
Of all the many printers I have set up in the past few years, far less than half were physically close enough to the PC to fall within the distance limits imposed by USB cables. I recently had to set up a printer for a user who had moved the printer to a more accessable location and in my research to find a long enough USB cable discovered that there is a practical 10 foot limit. It's nearly impossible to find a longer than 6 foot cable, and the reason is that the USB spec is sharply limited in distance supported. You're expected to use an amplifier every so many feet if you need more than about 10 feet.
USB may be great for a lot of things, but some peripherals (particularly printers) are commonly much further away than that. We have serial terminals all over the building hooked up to one server. That would never work with USB.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
NT OSes (and OS/2) don't have "native" support for DOS programs - they use an emulator called VDM.exe ("Virtual DOS Machine").
The can have my IBM Model M PS2 keyboards when they pry them out of my cold dead hands. I've got four of them with an average age of 12 years old and they all work flawlessly, which is alot more than I can say for any other keyboard ever made. Period. My forst one I paid over $150.00 (US) for and my last three I've gotten from government surplus sales. I might replace my video card every year, but not these babies!
Legacy free, my eye!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Hardware has gotten better over the last 20 years
Software hasn't
I'm not kidding, folks. Hardware has obvoulsly gotten better - faster, more reliable, cheaper, simpler to interconnect and configure. The hardware available to research labs is at most one generation ahead of what's sold to the masses.
On the software front, though, remarkably little has changed in the last twenty+ years, except for stuff moving from research labs out to the real world, and consolidation behind the Microsoft "standard". How much difference is there, fundamentally, between an Alto running Smalltalk and a PC running XP (other than hackability and stability, of course)? The major difference is that the Alto could only interact with the small community of other Altos, whereas the XP box can hang out with the much larger community of PCs.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
How about those 360K single-sided single density floppies? Too bad you don't get to 360K until you get to double-sided, double-density 5.25" floppies.
It's not that hard to do a little basic research.
Oh, and it's called "BASIC", not "Basic". (I wonder if he even knows what the Hell "BASIC" stands for?)
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
This guy makes it sound like 20 years of backwards compatability is an accident, rather than something carefully and painstakingly constructed.
Yes. That's why I said "Americans".
Smart boy.
Yeah well my dad can beat up your dad.
[blink] Could something like that explain the sometimes strange behaviour of my latest mouse? It's got a USB connector (I couldn't even FIND an optical mouse with a PS/2 or serial connector) and a PS/2 adapter. It seems to occasionally have sputters and delays (and once in a long while, an outright hardware lockup) that I've never seen with a straight PS/2 or straight serial connected mouse, and that don't seem to be related to being of the optical species.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yeah, because my serial port, paralell port, floppy drive, and PS/2 port are keeping my computer from evolving to ... uh.. .an iMac!
Seriously folks, just because something's old doesn't mean it needs to go. Sometimes it's not worth the cost of transitioning; skip this technology, and just pay the cost once, when the next technology comes along. Sometimes the new technologies are too proprietary. Zip drives eventually failed, I think, becuse of both of the above issues.
I also believe that Apple moved away from the floppy too early; when Apple dumped the floppy, there was no widespread, standardized, rewritable media to use. Now, with USB keychains and cheap CD-R/RW, we're reaching a point where it's appropriate to eliminate floppy drives. As such, I disagree with the statement that "PCs are just now catching up to Apple" as many Apple cheerleaders say here on slashdot.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
"single-sided, low-density floppies holding 360K"
Nope. Originally, there was a single-sided, double-density drive holding 160K. Then a double sided variant appeared holding (wait for it) 320K. When DOS 2.0 came along, they crammed nine sectors per track instead of eight, and got 180K out of single-sided disks, and 360K out of two-sided disks.
Then the AT and DOS 3.0 came along, and we had "high-density" 5.25" disks that held 1.2M.
Finally, the PS/2s came along with 3.5" drives in two varieties -- the cheaper ISA boxes had "double-density" 720K versions, while the more expensive MCA (which isn't even mentioned in the article -- poor IBM) units sported the now-familiar "high-density" 1.44MB versions.
"in fact, very few engineers are proficient in machine language."
Why is it that everyone just assumes that it's the engineers that do software design? Most of the BIOS programming is probably done by the CS guys, as most of them are proficient in machine language.
Have you ever heard a CS guy rant about the quality of an engineer's code? It's some of the most humorous, yet completely rational and founded stuff in the world. Engineers (mainly EE) should stick with the circuits and logic gates. Maybe they should even take more classes in CS.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Just to be safe, Im stockpiling bottled water, shotguns, and 386s...
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I am all for getting rid of legacy ports, particularly floppies, which I hate. None of my machines have floppies.
However, that does not mean I am an idiot: I realize that there is a NEED for a ubiquitous R/W device that is not the HD so that you can put BIOS flashes, drivers, or disk utilities on it for "under the hood" changes.
What is needed is a universal CD-RW format that the BIOS can understand (and write to). From my understanding, this is what Mt. Ranier format is supposed to do.
It would be really nice to scrap the floppy and be able to have a 650+ meg disk that can load an OS, save drivers to it, and repair disks, all without having to swap out 20 floppies at a time.
Yes, memory sticks may do this job, but it would be so much more ELEGANT if a single device (your optical drive) could also double for this purpose.
No, you said "People only seem to understand how stupid they are when their children are dead and their cities lie in ashes." "People" not "Americans" or "American people" meaning your statement applies to all "people." So, I must assume you include the Iraqis in that.
and my wheels are still made out of stone, too!
It's not like the wheel is free of innovation.
By that, do you mean that you have one of those broken and recalled microsoft optical mice? It has nothing to do with it being USB or PS/2. Microsoft happens to have just made a crappy mouse and they even recalled it.
Quote: "EFI isn't space-constrained because its data resides in a special reserved area of the hard drive."
So, EFI is just a motherboard driver called by the BIOS... that the motherboard supposedly doesn't have...
If it doesn't have a BIOS, what are you running when you setup a new HDD, and what process puts the EFI on the 'special reserved area'???
Karma: Very High - Due to good looks, wit, charm... Oh, wait... It's going down... WHAT HAPPENED?!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
""InformationWeek is running a story by Fred Langa which gives an overview of the ways to create a true-Legacy-free computer. Finally we can have a PC not based on twenty year old technology.""
That doesn't do a damn thing about my collection of peripherals based on "twenty year-old technology." I've got a USB 1.1 controller built-in to my motherboard and a USB 2.0 daughter board. What's next? IEEE 1394? Heck no, I need a serial controller with a PCI interface (I've only seen ISA, and people like you make it almost impossible to find a modern motherboard with ISA interfaces), because I only have two RS-232 ports and four devices to plug into them.
You know what else would be nice? A game card. I have nearly a dozen different kinds of joysticks and game pads, and only one of them is USB-only. I could probably get along fine with my Gravis GRiP, but that only works in Windows 95 (!). Why? Because Gravis had to jump on the new technology bandwagon, going all USB and forasking their older technology.
Paralell ports I'm fine with. Luckily, I only have a scanner to plug into it.
But other than "because it's cool!" why should I spend money on a "legacy-free" computer?
That has NOTHING to do with the older standard. That is just left over design cruft from the original PC XT. Such conflicts occur in PC's only because no real design was ever done in that area before the resulting byproduct got set in stone.
Although, I would expect that much of that cruft went by the wayside as PCI overcame ISA.
By the time USB finally became widely used, those problems probably didn't even exist anymore (to be solved by new fangled hardware).
If the XT ISA architecture ever pained you, it's your own damn fault for not being a more active consumer and allowing crap like that to become predominant.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well, YEAH. I mean, it's like putting a square peg (USB) into a round hole (PS2).
Don't you have grandparents? :P
Seriously, any problems, use the real deal. Either go all USB, or all 'obsessive, compulsive backwards compatible' - according to the parent post. ;)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
the only thing gained by getting rid of usefull ports and slots on a PC is making it cheaper and forcing you to upgrade when none is necessary. I have two NMS DSP boards that are now useless (at $8900 a pop) because no newer PC will accept an ISA board. I am forced to upgrade to basically the same board with a differect interface... this legacy free garbage is just a way to force your peripherals to be obsolete and require you to upgrade. Serial and parallel ports are very usefull and easy to program an experiment with... I hope these don't go soon.
Interfacing to a UART is trivial. Much more trivial than with USB
Standard serial ports don't have a power supply with a well-specified current budget (you have to use wierd parasitic power supplies that don't always work on laptop serial ports).
Serial ports require negative voltages (more workarounds with switched-capacitor inverters).
Serial ports don't have a reliable way to detect plug and unplug events.
Serial ports don't have a standard way to identify the type of device plugged in.
Serial ports cannot be expanded and chained with hubs.
Serial ports require an interrupt per byte and are connected on the legacy ISA bus - each I/O cycle takes nearly a microsecond (thousands of cycles on a modern PC!). A USB controller is a bus-mastering PCI device with a scheduler driven by table data structures.
Serial ports are slower. Sure, USB 1.1 is not terribly fast at 12mbps but it was a design compromise to keep it cheap enough so you can build a mouse for less than $1 material cost.
Serial ports don't have isochronous transfer modes for timing-sensitive data like audio and modem signals.
A DB9 connector is less friendly than the USB connector. I hate those retaining screws.
A DB9 connector is not designed with recessed pins for better ESD protection.
A DB9 connector is not designed with data pins recessed farther than the power and ground pins for safe hot insertion and removal.
Serial ports use an antiquated notion of DCE and DTE to determine connector gender and everyone generally screws it up so gender changers are occasionally necessary.
Yes. A UART interface is trivial. Except when you have to find out why it's not working (oops, it's disabled or set up in the BIOS as an IRDA port).
Serial ports don't have predefined device classes so a variety of devices can use a standard driver.
Sure, all this comes at a certain price and the Microsoft implementation of USB PnP and standard device class drivers leaves something do be desired but it's generally an improvement over UARTs.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
And floppy disks seem to be smaller now too; I haven't seen a 5 1/4 incher for a while...
First off, I like certain parts of legacy. Like,
not being able to
a) use my laptop as serial console (it has no serial
port any more)
b) switch my IBM "clickety-click" keyboard on my
laptop (it has no PS/2 port any more - only
two USB, one VGA and one parallel)
is icky. I heavily dislike it. My IBM keyboard
weighs about six kilopond, but that's what makes
it good.
OTOH, think about all the "small" OSes, i.e.
non-Windows and non-GNU/Linux.
Will they ever work on those computers?
Also, since the design changes, you can never
know if TCPA is already inside.
I hope I can shed some light on it, and I'm
just trying to tell people to not forget their
own past.
I still like MS GW-BASIC 3.22 - I was 8 when
I learned it (and did not even understand a
single word of English; I started to learn
English at the age of 12).
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
The thing that really galls me about people who are strong, sometimes rabid, advocates of 'doing away with Legacy hardware' is that really, they're advocates of huge garbage landfills. It's fine to 'eliminate legacy design' if you're trying to sell new hardware in one or two year cycles to everybody. It's nuts if you're reasonable about what you spend and you want to incrementally upgrade to maintain your investment.
An excellent example of 'Legacy design practices' that work are the B-52 bombers. The airframes are almost always older than the pilots who fly them these days. The US Government probably couldn't afford to replace all the hardware we have long term investments in to keep the B-52 fleet running. And they shouldn't have to.
There do need to be 'breaks' with the past. Several significant breaks that I can think of in PC technology were the shift from the 'baby AT' to the ATX form factor for motherboards. The move from the 5-1/4" to 3-1/2" diskette and fixed disk drive footprint.
Finally, the organization that has Pissed me off the most when it comes to the 'anti-legacy' movement is Microsoft. They've for years advocated doing away with a number of legacy hardware features. I used to joke that the way to 'update' an older motherboard to be 'PC 2000' compliant (one of the Microsoft 'standards' they tried to impose for a vendor to get 'ready for Windows' labeling) was to use a side cutter to remove the serial, parallel, keyboard, and mouse ports, then fill the ISI slot board edge connectors with potting epoxy.
Ummm... fuck that.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
At least in Unix the slashes run the right way, and text files don't use silly two-byte line terminators.
The overused term legacy-free looks like nothing but a PC that is specifically designed to require a specific Intel/Microsoft combination of hardware and software by implementing specific proprietary features. The article claims that a 'legacy-free' design will allow new 'innovation' but does not provide any examples of innovations that are being prevented by current architecture. The original 1981 IBM PC utilized many 'legacy' features borrowed from earlier platforms including the design of the 'centronics' parallel printer port and serial data ports, ASCII text characters, floppy disk drives, POST power on, memory error-checking, etc. The design of any complex device, be it a computer, a car, an airplane, or a home, is an evolutionary process in which the best 'legacy' features from prior designs are utilized along with new design features based on new materials and technologies. We even have some special terms for the 'legacy' design features such as "knowledge", "experience", "SAE Standards," and "building codes."
No, it's an A4Tech, which in my experience builds relatively durable mice.
I wondered why there were piles of cheap M$ optical mice at the last swapmeet... betcha they were those recalled mice fallen into a greymarket retail channel.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Okay, I'll go all USB... as soon as someone buys me a new KVM switch that has a USB port, and finds a way to get proper USB support on every necessary machine attached to it... Oh, not to mention you'll have to replace my parallel printer and SCSI scanner.
Maybe you young'uns don't remember this, but there was a day when USB stuff (especially mice and keyboards) had to be plugged into the hub in the "correct" order (determinable only by inspecting the entrails of a white unicorn), or it wouldn't work.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I've been running a legacy-free computer since 1987 when I bought my first Mac.
See a trend here? Seems the x86 world is just now getting around to solving legacy issues that Apple solved long ago. Welcome to the future, folks.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
For example, a traditional BIOS is space-limited, so most are programmed in compact, low-level "machine language," which is notoriously difficult to do well--in fact, very few engineers are proficient in machine language.
:)
That's right: legacy-free engineers use assembler.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
I remember that, but us 'Young and Wise' guys let you guys slosh through the new crap before we even attempt to use it ;)
I personally still use my ISA 3com NIC, and my ISA SB AWE 32, I have 2 USB ports, and only use 2 USB devices at a time. My mouse is PS/2, my keyboard is AT. I've had my keyboard for 11 years (thankfully, the only original part from that purchase). IMHO, using a USB hub is asking for more cost/trouble than it's worth. (maybe I'm not the young'un ;)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
How about almost none.
I haven't seen any new motherboards for standard PCs with ISA slots in 3 years.
Maybe someone makes one but it ain't in stores. You'd need to order it "special".
Now in the embedded world all that's different. They still use 486's!
The EFI is a tiny, secure operating system that sits between the hardware of a PC--or any computing device--and the high-level operating system (like Windows or Linux) that humans normally interact with. Although the EFI can emulate a traditional BIOS, it also can do much more. For example, it can provide a full mouse-driven graphical interface for controlling the low-level hardware functions that today can only be controlled by hitting a special key at startup and entering a limited, arcane, and text-only "BIOS Setup" routine.
Does this mean that Intel will dictate what OS they will allow on the hardware?
contrast, EFI is written in C, the world's most popular high-end programming language, and EFI isn't space-constrained because its data resides in a special reserved area of the hard drive. This means that far more engineers will be able to do more creative things with PC hardware than is now possible.
[sarcasm]Oh yeah, because magnetic storage is SO much more reliable than solid state EEPROMs and the thought of engineers getting "creative" with my system sounds SO safe.[/sarcasm]
Seriously folks, what happens the first time you want to put Linux on your box and you screw up repartitioning your drive. No more booting. Ever. The mechanism that controls basic bootup and hardware functions must be segregated from userland to the maximum extent possible. Even then it has to have some sort of hardware reset in case you screw up too bad. This EFI thing sounds like it's going to really screw up some people's machines.
I don't want people getting creative with some things on my PC, I just want them to work. If engineers want to be creative, they should go work for NASA... not mess with my BIOS!
That's all this is is PR for Intels new BS with a touch on Serial ATA just to make it seem objective. This guy doesn't seem to realize that standards are a good thing and that there are industry bodies who work with a large portion of these companies to come up with new standards. All he does is talk about stuff being *old* and what Intel has planned to fix it. Just for those who want to know, MY primary reason not to adopt some of the new tech (like those damned USB memory things) is price and DURABILITY. I can drop a floppy and it still works. For that matter, I can throw one across the room and it usually still work. And if it breaks, darn! I'm out 15-30 CENTS. People wants something for their money that is going to last a while and a lot of the computer race doesn't address that need. Newer, faster, bigger, better only works with the portion of the populace that CAN AFFORD IT! And then they sell off their *old stuff* to friends who can't afford new or to shops to help defray the cost of the new, thus creating a need for things to last more than 1-2 years. Basically, If you can afford it and feel its right for you, then upgrade (especially if you can afford the tech support for it), but let those who can't follow the evolutionary path to "legacy free". Enough ranting, I gotta get a Coke!
Around the start of this year, I was putting together a new PC. Being a bit of a geek, I was choosing all the parts separately, putting them in a funky aluminium case, planning to dual-boot with Linux, etc. etc.
One thing that I seriously investigated was buying a legacy-free motherboard. I figured I had precious little need for "old" kit. I was wrong. Below are a few of the many reasons I rejected the legacy-free option.
In the end I went for a system that ditched the pointless stuff. I have no floppy drive installed, for example. I also have a motherboard with decent on-board sound and networking, which cuts down a lot on the add-in cards. But legacy-free I'm not. I connected up my old hard drive to transfer data over, and I could still connect up the floppy or Zip if I needed access to data via those, too. I eventually bought a new printer for other reasons anyway (mumble, mumble, Panasonic and WinXP and no drivers, mumble) so I do use USB for that. I saved thirty quid by sticking with my nice, comfy PS/2 keyboard (none of this overly light, USB-enabled smart keyboard crap for me) and my trusty MS wheel mouse.
And you know what? Somehow, everything works and I don't feel at all held back, however old and boring I may be.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It could be true that there is nothing wrong with the serial port to connect a modem. But the article said nothing about the most obsolete component in today's Intel PC - the processor itself. So we might see a PC with a fancy BIOS that comes with its own windowing system, but still has a processor with less than 10 general purpose registers. I know that Apple, Sun, AMD and so on probably underplay the significance of clock speed. But, 1GHZ PowerPC sure runs faster than 1GHZ P4. What we need is a modern, legacy free instruction set specially designed to support modern programming languages like C++ and Java. Large number of registers and hardware stack ("register windows") support is a start, but I am sure there are new ideas developed after Sparc design. What would an ideal machine language of today look like if it doesn't have to be remotely understandable by a human, only by the optimizing compiler. For example, if Intel's branch prediction, load/store reordering, parallel execution and so on are already specified by instructions themselves. And of course, this means starting anew with a single instruction set. No more emulating 8086, 80286, 80386 and so on in hardware. Software emulation, like 68K programs under MacOSX comes to mind, but I guess better legacy free all the way. Which means that the start is probably not a desktop PC, but a cheap, high-performance server. If you can have a Linux port, database server and a J2EE application server available, you might not care about the rest for your online store server if you get a better price/performance ratio. When the technology does come to desktop it will be probably covered with adapters, software emulation and even some bits of hardware emulation like a christmas tree and it will take years to whittle them away. Well, that's life.
BTW, I write to you from a 386SX/16 w/4MB RAM and a 200MB hard drive over a 14.4/Kbps modem running MS-DOS 6.22 and GeoWorks Ensemble (a.k.a NewDeal). ;-)
[laughing] Us wise old guys let the young'uns jump off the cliffs. There's always some thrillseeker who wants to be the first to see his own blood. :)
I've got all sorts of ISA cards in my various machines too -- mostly sound, modem, and SCSI. One of the things I looked for when I last bought major-upgrade motherboards, was LOTS of ISA slots. These Tyans have FOUR. One of 'em is full up, too. (Modem, sound card, SCSI HA, NIC.)
In fact, I had to add an old SB16 sound card to this P3, because the PCI SBLive wouldn't work in DOS (nor in a DOS window), and for my uses, that's not acceptable!
(Irony: the SB16 is one of the leftovers from when this P3 started life, as a 486. It also still has the same case, power supply, floppies, and some cables. Yes, it's an *AT* P3!)
I'm not thrilled with USB in general. The only use I've had for it so far is dumping photos from a friend's digital camera, and even then it wouldn't play nice with the WinXP side of that box -- good thing it still dual-boots WinME (even if WinME does nothing else right, it excels at PnP).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I actually have spent very little on this, relatively, bought a lot of this stuff as needed as time went by, not all at once, haha. I am a broke college student.
Uhhhh, so what happens when my hard drive crashes, how do I configure a new hard drive on the mobo, if the EFI user interface was on the old hard drive? gee, use the BIOS boot with a floppy
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
"For example, it can provide a full mouse-driven graphical interface for controlling the low-level hardware functions that today can only be controlled by hitting a special key at startup and entering a limited, arcane, and text-only "BIOS Setup" routine."
You mean that "special key" only some of us have? That "text-only" display that only works on a few exotic monitors? That "limited" "arcane" routine that condenses hardware settings into a few screenfuls that don't need to be scrolled--under that pitifully easy to navigate single-level menu?
"EFI isn't space-constrained because its data resides in a special reserved area of the hard drive. This means that far more engineers will be able to do more creative things with PC hardware than is now possible."
Can't wait...
"This is not a sig." -- R.
ISA is gone from MOST new motherboards and most mice and keyboards are USB now.....
Granted some of the system achitechture is old and slow, which is why now that CPUs have reached the 2ghz mark the chip makers need to fucus on BUS speed. Some of these machines with 1ghz + processors are like a Lamborgini in a school zone...
http://www.englishfirst.org
I see a deeper issue with this apparent obsession with "legacy-free," and it has NOTHING to do with "holding back the state-of-the-art."
First, consider this; All the peripherals mentioned -- ISA slots (which, admittedly, I wouldn't mind seeing go away), serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard-and-mouse ports -- are all dirt cheap, and dead easy to implement. The technology to do so has been around for decades. It is proven, it's stable, and it's all (as others have pointed out) add-ons. Having add-ons does NOTHING that I can see to inhibit the "evolution" of the core microprocessor and support logic.
UNLESS, that is, you're Microsoft or Hollywood. Consider all the noise in recent years about digital copyrights, copy protection, ad nauseum. Consider the vast array of add-ons Out There that let consumers burn CDs, DVDs, make tape backups, etc., adding to Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen's ongoing nightmares. Consider further that Microsoft is one of several companies in a partnership that dictates PC hardware standards.
Now, how do you wrest control away from the computer consumer, in a slow and insidious fashion, so they won't even guess what's happening until its too late? In other words, how do you turn those pesky general-purpose PCs into something that will still do everything Joe or Jane SixPack will want it to, but that exerts all kinds of copy controls and limitations when you hook one of those annoying CD or DVD burners to it?
Why, that's easy. Disguise the removal of those annoyingly versatile, general-purpose, and (most importantly) difficult-to-copy-control features like serial, parallel, SCSI, and others as moving towards "legacy-free" systems!
What's more, let's remake the operating system so that add-on peripherals have to be blessed by Microsoft in order to even run with Windows, today and more than ever in the future! Sure! Just let Uncle Steve, Uncle Bill, and the RIAA/MPAA take care of EVERYTHING, and you won't ever have to worry about violating copyrights, or learning ANYthing more about computers than where the "On" switch is, ever again. Trust us, we know what's best for You!
Consider that, in the not-too-distant future, might we see a "PC" that has NO expansion slots? Just Redmond and Hollywood-approved "ports?"
Yes, I probably am letting my paranoid side run rampant again. However, as I said in another post; If the consumer crowd wants to let themselves be led around by the nose, fine. That's their privilege. All I ask is don't force this "Legacy-Free!" crap down the throats of those of us who don't need it, don't want it, and can't possibly make use of it for our applications.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
For instance, examine the following paragraph from the article:
Okay, so what is a BIOS? BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System. It has (limited) drivers for interfacing to the hardware, and a user interface. In essence, it is an operating system to the same degree as DOS; DOS hands control of the machine to a single program, and will never get it back unless that program makes interrupt calls. This is why x86 assembler on some flavor of DOS is still one of the most popular platform for "embedded" and "industrial" systems, mostly for machine control and the like. Automotive smog test systems are almost always PCs. Color matching systems, likewise.
So the BIOS is already an OS, it is secure, and furthermore I have seen BIOS entirely in flash ROM which has a GUI, optionally mouse-driven interface. (A basic mouse driver is trivial to write, especially if all you support is PS/2 mice, which all use the same protocol.) Doing USB and whatnot is much more difficult and your flash might actually have to be, like, a couple megabytes in size rather than the usual 512kB or 1MB.
Furthermore the crap intel is proposing runs on the hard drive. This is a big reason why Compaq machines are such a pain in the ass as it is; Many of them don't have a normal PC BIOS with a configuration tool in them (though my Compaq Presario 1692 Laptop does) and you have to use the stuff on the hard drive. This means (for those of you who are a little slow on the uptake) that if you don't have a working hard drive connected, you cannot configure the system.
As for the "limited, arcane, and text-only" BIOS screens; There are BIOSes with built in help, like pretty much all of them these days. Most of the help isn't filled in, for whatever reason. Also, it's always arcane, there is quite simply no way around that, because computer hardware is complicated! Memory has timings for latency, for example. The SPD ((E)E)PROM will solve that problem for you but ram without it is cheaper...
Let's see, what else can I pick apart in his article?
Actually, the reason USB never took off is because all early implementations of USB have terrible latency and don't even begin to approach their supposed peak bandwidth. Newer systems still don't get it right; Games which are highly CPU-dependent (like Unreal and its descendants) will cause your mouse input to choke, and sometimes even caused missed keypresses. On MODERN implementations! This is unacceptable. USB is better technology than AT keyboards (After all, PS/2 is the same as AT, with a different plug) and PS/2 mice (which are just serial ports at a lower voltage, 5V rather than 12V IIRC) but so much effort has been expended on making those lega
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
PowerPC = RISC
You never heard of a legacy-based system? We're still coding for it.
EAZ, Apple developer since 1996
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Could be. I created the EZ Shell on top of FreeBSD. You might remember it's less ingenious versions used as pseudo-gui's, such as the dosshell. -Zen
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Get with the time gramps, PS2 Keyboards are where it's AT!
(yes pun intended)
Though, not specifically Intel, I noticed the focus running in the direction of specifically associated companies, and the entire lack of pointing out similar projects being done by their competitors.
In fact, it's the reason I came to read the comments: To see if anyone else felt that way.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
I play UT2003, a very fast multiplayer FPS. To me having my Logitech dual optical strung up to the legacy port is crucial. An USB mouse is slower, as the PS/2 signals are better synced, 'closer' to the CPU and waste less ticks per instruction.
I definetly don't want my mouse and keyboard gettin' the hickups in midst of a fast multiplayer hackfest. And be it only for a split second.
I tried USB once, cause I kinda like the idea of hotplugging (I use my printer via USB and it's a breeze), but it just doesn't cut it for signal intensive input devices. No fscking way are serious gamers going to switch to non-legacy mice any time soon.
Since this guy is jacking of on USB, EFI and whatnot of Intel stuff and goes on bullshitting about how legacy is slowing down PC evolution 'cause people don't buy USB mice (who and what gave him that idea???) I have a hard time taking him for granted. He's most certainly a payed-off Intel advocate.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
- Multi-tasking kernel.
- Windowing system and themeable GUI toolkit.
- Screen-saver.
- TCP/IP stack for Internet networking, either with RS-232/SLIP or Ethernet (PPP is under development).
- Personal webserver for convenient file transfer. (Only in the C64/TFE version.)
- Simple telnet client. (Only in the RS232/SLIP version.)
- Web browser for Internet web surfing. (Worlds first web browser for 8-bit systems!
?Look no further: Contiki
You will need a modem, though.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
How hard is that, really?
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
Was that the first generation of the IntelliMouse explorer or whatever you call it? I had one of those that just stopped working one day. To MS's credit, they eventually shipped me a replacement...which also broke. I got fed up and just went back to my old non-optical mouse. But that's interesting to hear it was a widespread defect with the product, guess I should have waited a little longer before adopting something as unnatural as a mouse with no ball ;)
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
We should remove the blinking cursor from our consoles then.
.sigs are useless; it doesn't protect you from imposters.
I only buy motherboards with the ram slots on the bottom. The old has just got to go.
"Take a look at this almost-20-year-old image (left) scanned from the October 1984 issue of Byte magazine, which covered the rollout of the original IBM PC AT. If you've ever opened up your PC, the overall layout will instantly seem familiar, and you'll recognize many of the components. Note the power supply in the rear right corner, the floppies in the open bays on the right, the hard drive in the closed bay near the center, the system switches and speaker, and the card slots to the left."
But look at cars from 90 years ago! Notice the four tires, the two lights in front for night driving, and the steering wheel! How much longer must this go on!
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. When I think "legacy free" I think "major headache": USB only (new keyboard and printer time), firewire, SATA and floppy-less PCs, but the operating systems out there aren't ready.
Did you know any RAID or SCSI device must be installed using a floppy when installing XP as a fresh install? Doesn't read the CD, it specifically asks for a floppy to read the drivers. Without this you can't use any drive connected to the RAID/SCSI as the boot drive, which almost defeats the purpose of having fast SCSI or RAID controllers if the OS is installed on a slow IDE drive.
So all this talk of "Legacy Free" PCs is just a pipedream until (hopefully) the next OS support it.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
After all, this is the stuff that survived for 20 years. There's plenty of true 'legacy' hardware out there isn't being incorporated into current systems--think of CGA video, MFM hard drives, VESA, EISA, and MCA buses, etc. The reason PS/2, serial, and parallel ports--along with floppy drives and the like--have survived is that they are not only fairly useful, they're what even more useful and ubiquitous technologies are built on.
I had extremely similar problems with my first optical mouse (MS). I took it back & got a Logitech. Same problem! Brought it in to work to test, and it worked fine. WTF? Turns out it was my mouse *pad* that was the problem.
:D
Just an idea
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
I think it's safe to assume that in this context, legacy free actually means cruft free.
The problem is that people tend to read only the better moderated comments, and mod them even further without ever seeing the excellent post at +1. The solution could be something like this:
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
USB adoption: While not critical to the article, the introduction of the iMac was a big help for USB adoption.
Plug-and-Play: He mention Windows 95 was the first OS to support Plug-and-play. It's not exactly the same thing, but Mac OS 7 was fully capable of detecting new cards and using drivers for them if they were available. I was able to add Ethernet, multiple display, etc to a Mac IIci without so much as a floppy disk.
PCI Express: He goes off on how great and legacy-free this is, while he notes that PCI Express will use the "classic PCI driver model..." - HOW IS THIS LEGACY FREE?!
Here's a thought for a legacy-free PC right now:
- USB
- FireWire
- Serial ATA
- AGP
- PCI
- Ethernet
- A single system controller, no north/south bridge
For a compact system that could be made right now, put a single HD & optical drive on Serial ATA, put one AGP slot for a video card, one AMR for an optional modem, and a PCI slot if you don't want on-board sound. Put a USB port on front and 2 on back. Put a FireWire port on front and 2 on back. 10/100/1000 Base-T RJ-45, with the same PCI slot for Fiber or Fibre Channel to taste. This could be thin enough to be a "monitor stand" or small enough to innocuously sit with books on your desk.If you wanted ultra-legacy free, you could use just Serial-ATA, USB & FireWire - you can transmit both TCP/IP and video streams over FireWire, and there are ethernet adaptors for both USB and FireWire. Of course, you would need an independant FireWire controller for video.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Does this mean we can buy them without legacy software, such as Microsoft(R) Windows(TM)?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm all for abandoning useless legacy features in "typical" PCs if they make them cheaper and more stable.
For example, abandoning the ISA standard in favor of PCI was overall a good, if a bit late (and contrived, with VESA and EISA, etc), development. Although I regretted losing a few good expansion cards, there was really not much lost beyond sentimental value.
PCI is showing its age, and the transition to PCI-Express (or whatever name it ends up having) will be welcome.
Serial ATA, once it's mature, will be also a welcome change. No need for those big cables in the case, at least.
I've been operating without a floppy disk drive for years now, with only minor inconveniences whenever some BIOS update, old DOS driver or utility demands a "boot disk" the old-fashioned way. There's no reason to assume it's there anymore, and it's a useless expense in both money and space.
Those are good changes. But this is not always the case.
Case 1: Legacy Ports
No more PS/2 ports, no more serial ports? USB and Firewire all the way!!
Sure, sounds great if it works. Except that it almost never does.
USB support in PCs is "decent" now, but it's not 100% reliable, and one can't afford to be left with no input device because the BIOS/OS/random-thing-I-don't-know-of has problems with USB today.
My current PC has a bunch of unused USB ports, but I'm still sticking to PS/2 mouse and keyboards. The reason is that every week or so someone calls me because they have a problem with their computer and it happens to be the USB mouse and/or keyboard which just stops working.
I reduced my "family technical support" calls by 50% just by putting a USB->Serial adapter on my father's keyboards and mouses.
I have the same problem one or twice a month with almost all USB devices I use: printers, cameras, etc. I use USB for them because they need the bandwidth, and because I can afford to tinker with them every so often.
Sometimes all it requires is plugging and unplugging. Sometimes turning the device on or off (printers and wireless devices). Sometimes rebooting the machine. Sometimes it just starts working again without a clear cause. It rarely takes more than 2 minutes, so it's not a problem (if you have a traditional mouse/keyboard with you).
This doesn't apply to basic input devices:
I don't need MB/s of bandwidth to type or move a cursor, and I certainly can't afford to lose my input devices because the USB controller, or BIOS, or the OS, or whatever causes the problem had a bad hair day. Particularly because it can take more than 2 minutes to fix when you have no input devices to figure what's going on.
On the other hand, if my PS/2 keyboard stops responding, I know it's a hardware issue. Replace keyboard, or, at worst, replace port.
This is just within the Windows world. I had enough trouble getting USB support working in a few Linux installations not to bother trying anymore, as I haven't really needed to.
Maybe it works flawlessly and automatically from some distributions now, but I wouldn't risk anything going wrong there.
Basic I/O has to work flawlessly, and in PCs, even in brand-new machines, I just don't trust USB that much. Maybe it's precisely because of the legacy support, I don't know, but I think it's been long enough for BIOS/OSes/etc to get it right.
Case 2: Legacy BIOS
They want to make the BIOS an OS? What happened to small and simple?
I guess having it programmed in C would be an advantage, and I'm sure there are technical limitations with the current BIOS technology that could use an update, but I'm worried about this approach.
If you need an OS, that's what the OS is for. If you need diagnostic utilities et al, get an OS and run diagnostic utilities on it.
Why do you need to put this in the firmware layer? Firmware should be small and stable. If something fails in firmware, you're normally in deep trouble.
A BIOS is not something
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Just curious. Have you ever written a comment that wasn't insightful? (or accurate?)
:)
Keep up the interesting posts (and I agree about the mac only because I am currently building a cluster of some 90 200 mhz supermacs, and a few dozen 120 to 100 mhz power pcs... I'm going for paralellism and 100% cheapness as opposed to actual performance
(how else can you buy a cluster for under 100 bucks?)(USD).
I am quite impressed with how advanced they are compared to MY old 200 mhz pcs... not only fast on mac OS 9... but also much colder running than an equivalent 200 mhz intel/amd/cyrix based system.
Speaking of macs and floppies, the automatic floppy drives were quite neat.
Can you recommend what flavor linux I should use on the PPC's?
-DaedalusHKX
PS - currently YellowDog, and feel free to mod me offtopic if you want.
PPS - anyone have a clue as to how to bypass the need to keep a MAC OS partition on yellow dog PPC's pre imac/ppc Gx series?
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
I don't really understand how needing to run a virtual machine for old OS 9 apps isn't considered a "legacy issue".....
It seems like this would give the earlier posts (more of) an advantage. Why not display the comments in random order as well?
of course, the now super-speedo usb2.0 & firewire-interfaces will be obsolete within less than 10 years. even the keyboards will then have a much faster connection.
but since the users will want to use their old gadgets (the new ones today), the mainboard manufacturer of the future will have to implement legacy usb and legacy firewire etc. or he wouldn't sell too much.
20 years from now, people on slashdot that are born now at this very moment will complain about the stupid legacy usb ports on their machine, taking up valuable space between the neural net interface and the anti-gravity device.
the truth: legacy free pcs will only exist a very brief moment in time, just as long as it takes the industrie to produce The Next Big Thing (tm).
every architecture that is sold in millions of units at >100$ each will become a legacy hindrance some time in the not-so-distant future. technology priest that preach otherwise are just too blind to see that...
I knew this would happen, my intention was to make a little joke, and point out that legacy is what make some things useful. But, of course, it just started a holy war. JIHAD!!!!!
If you "knew this would happen," then why didn't you come up with something more clever and original, which would not provoke such a response?
Your Next PC: Legacy Free?
IBM's PC AT has cast a shadow over PC system architecture for more than two decades. Thanks to advances such as Intel's EFI, PC vendors are on the verge of breaking the legacy bottlenecks. Kiss your BIOS goodbye.
By Fred Langa, InformationWeek
Apr 7, 2003 (12:00 AM)
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030404S0 003
Many people don't know it, but today's PCs--including the system you're using right now--contain elements that have hardly changed at all in the last 20 years. Yes, CPUs are faster, hard drives are bigger, and RAM banks are larger. But in many fundamental ways, your PC isn't very different from the PCs of two decades ago.
Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look at this almost-20-year-old image (left) scanned from the October 1984 issue of Byte magazine, which covered the rollout of the original IBM PC AT. If you've ever opened up your PC, the overall layout will instantly seem familiar, and you'll recognize many of the components. Note the power supply in the rear right corner, the floppies in the open bays on the right, the hard drive in the closed bay near the center, the system switches and speaker, and the card slots to the left. Experienced eyes will even pick out the BIOS chip, the battery backup for the BIOS, the RAM banks, the familiar-looking cables and electrical connectors, and more.
Although some of the system elements have been modified over time, almost everything in your PC is a direct lineal descendent of the IBM PC AT--a seminal design that still shapes PC architecture two decades later.
Stability--But Also Stagnation
In many ways, the PC's hardware consistency over time has been a good thing, a stabilizing force in the otherwise rapidly changing world of computing. It's been a huge positive for businesses and users because this consistency has made many peripherals completely interchangeable. For decades, we've been able to mix and match printers, keyboards, mice, monitors, scanners, modems, and more, largely without regard to the brand of PC.
Hardware standardization also has helped the bottom line by driving down prices: System and peripheral vendors have had a vast and uniform market from which to draw supplies, and to which to sell products, resulting in the commodity-level pricing that's behind today's amazingly low hardware costs. Overall, the PC AT's legacy has been an enormously positive one.
But it also has had a downside, principally in retarding innovation and slowing hardware advancements. The installed base--that is, the mass of existing, older, in-use hardware--acts like a giant speed brake on the computer industry because businesses and users are loath to give up older equipment that's still functional, even if newer designs would perform better or faster. As a result, new technologies tend to emerge piecemeal and more slowly than they would if hardware vendors could make a clean break with the past.
There's even a joke that made the rounds of the computing industry awhile ago: "Why was God able to create the universe in only seven days? Because he didn't have an installed base to deal with."
Despite this backward drag from the installed base, the Grail of many hardware engineers has long been a totally "legacy free" PC that can employ only fully modern, state-of-the-art, high-speed components and architectures. Such a PC would be faster, more compact, more reliable, and less expensive, as well as easier to manufacture and maintain.
Although partially legacy-free designs have emerged at various times, no one has yet put all the pieces together and produced a PC that traces none of its hardware architecture to the original IBM designs.
But that's about to change. As the PC AT's 20th anniversary approaches, some vendors are already working on totally legacy-free designs that will finally do away with even such fundamentals as the BIOS--the basic input/output system that has booted every PC ever made since the original IBM PC
Nope, sorry, it was a Wheel95 (tm) by Micro$tone (tm) running on a Tiree86 (tm)
:-)
Firestone might suck, but they DO make Bridgestone Potenza's too... in case you were wondering
-DaedalusHKX
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Sure the Crusoe is slower than an Athlon at its clock speed but at 1ghz it blows the P4 out of the water.
That being said, VLIW is ahead of its time by at least 5 to 10 years. The idea is where all architectures will merge eventually. 32 bit, 64 bit, my ass... how about VLIW 256 bit (crusoe right now).
All transmeta has to do is optimize it. The idea is solid, and the chip is "slow" only because its an entry into the market. TM has only been around for a few years as opposed to Intel, AMD, Apple, Motorola and IBM (Power PC is their chip).
I would trade my loud ass, hotter than hell, and aggravating Athlon and my P4 (at 2.8 ghz its even worse than the 1.466 OC'ed athlon) for a dual or quad Astro when they come out... actually come to think of it, if I have the cash when that happens, I will. Then I can take my server with me in the car, and not worry about it cooking since it will run at about 6 to 8 watts per chip.
Reminds me of the 6 to 10 watts days of the heatsink only chips or heatsink-less 386's.
-DaedalusHKX
PS - Try a mini via c3 sometime... slower but makes for good portable computing.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Good point about the random order. In fact I've set my reading order to inverse, so that I can quickly find the latest comments. It's slightly better than the usual order for moderation, but random would probably be even better.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
at 1 ghz the crusoe outperforms a 1 ghz P4 :)
my bad.
-DaedalusHKX
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Well, the topic here is hardware, not software, but I'll take the bait.
First of all, Microsoft did the same thing with Windows 95, and IBM with OS/2: they created a compatibility environment for 16-bit software so that it could run (more or less) under a 32-bit OS with all new APIs.
That said, Apple's Classic environment does it much better. I had tons of classic software when I climbed aboard the OS X bandwagon, and was amazed how smoothly it worked. Unless it tries to access hardware directly, it'll run just fine.
But that was a walk in the park compared to Apple's real trick: the switch from 680x0 to PowerPC architecture. With help from Connectix, they wrote an on-the-fly opcode conversion that worked so well, most 68k software ran faster under emulation on PPC than they did natively.
This points up a key factor in Apple's philosophy: hardware is just a means; software, and it's interaction with the user, is the end.
That said, their control of the hardware environment allows Apple to control it evolution, and gracefully manage the very hardware legacy issues the referenced article raises.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
>I'm not thrilled with USB in general.
Are you blaming the problem on USB or a crappy WinXP driver?
Seriously, what's the point of having so many different busses? USB, S-ATA, AGP... I would think that to be 'modern' there should be ONE bus that *anything* can connect to. Yes, that raises throughput issues. But there is already a model that does this, and solves these problems - ethernet.
I would picture a "legacy-free" pc as being one that has ONE bus in, that anything can plug into. Of course, to make sure things stay speedy, the mobo would have, say, 4 seperate segments of this bus. And you'd put your hard drives on a seperate segment than your video card. Have too many devices on one segment? Throw in a switch that intelligently routes traffic.
And take your damn ribbon cables and go home.
Speak before you think
Does legacy free mean that they are free to use the latest and greatest uninhibited technology
It's kind of a silly discussion, but I'll contribute to it in a nitpicky way.
ps2 vs adb
They aren't even similar. Sure, they've got a similar hole, but the signalling comes from a different school of thought entirely. ADB was prior and waaay more elegant. There is, however, the often-encountered elegance/price tradeoff here. PC keyboard was 30$, while the mac keyboards were 120 and up (for full keyboard) circa 1990-2.
plug n play
Awul awful awful. A horror upon the land. Luckily PCI has none of these problems. The horror known as "ISA PnP" should never have existed as PCI came first. As far as who got this right first though, I have to say that adding a SCSI controller, memory, and hard drive to my amiga consisted of: attaching the external unit. That's it.
ISA -> PCI
ISA in and of itself was another holy horror. Well, maybe it was good when invented (unsure here) but it ceratinly WAY outlived its usefulness. The mac transitioned to PCI around late 1995, while the PC world was definitely using it around 18 months earlier. The mac world changed over more uniformly, of course.
Open Firmware
Open Firmware is far better than EFI will ever hope to be. Apple helped defeat the usefulness of it of course by incompletely implementing it in a braindead fashion for years, while Sun had to carry the torch. Sad that. They mostly do a decent job here these days with a few occasional glitches. The relative closedness of the mac hardware base limits the utility of Open Firmware a bit, it would be much more of a boon to the unpleasant PC world.
IDE vs SCSI
The PC world was highly disk controller format agnostic for a long time, until IDE became clearly reasonably fast for largely cheap. There really wasn't much of a point for SCSI over IDE on a PC due to (see above) ISA. Unfortunately (again) mac did not (quite) implement the SCSI standard spec, with their own connector style and their own slightly different command set issues. The Mac certainly reaped benefits from taking the Cadillac of io busses as standard, however. Hooking up CDROMs, Zips, etc, to a non-scsi PC was amazingly painful before ATAPI came along.
Floppy drives
Thank you thank you apple for helping to bury these beasts. Ding fscking dong the witch is dead.
Boot off alternate media
A nice touch, although it really used to piss me off if my mac booted off a syquest that I left in the drive. The Amiga, blessedly came with selectable boot order and a menu to arbitrarily chose a boot volume. The IBM PC learned to boot off CDROMS in any mass capacity in what? 1997?
-josh
AMD shipped (yes shipped) the worlds very first legac free PC. It has no ISA bus. It has no PS2 keyboard or mouse connectors, it had no serial ports, it had no floppy disk, it had no paralell port. It was cool. It was new. AMD did it. My team did it.
= zd nn
http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/amd3deasnowc.html
We did it before Compaq.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-516379.html?legacy
We did it before Dell
We did it before anyone.
It was a flop.
People still want floppy disks, paralell ports, and serial ports.
At least the ISA bus is dead.
Jibe!
That's nice, too bad no one uses Macs.
My experience with "legacy free" laptops has been horrible. Our engineering software, Unigraphics, uses a hardware key that requires a parallel port. Combine that with some sensor input that requires a serial port (yes, they are chained) and you have a fairly hard machine to buy. We also need a machine with a basic Intel integrated graphics solution (only one supported by QNX). The number of choices is dwindling fast.
The fact remains, that if you're trying to do text output to a dumb terminal, serial is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to program and implement than firewire.
I like the ground hogs day effect of clicking on "next page" only to keep reading " Many people don't know it, but today's PCs--including the system you're using right now--contain elements that have hardly changed at all in the last 20 years" -- start dream sequence here ~~ " hardly changed at all..." "hardly changed at all" "have harldy changed at all..." --que twilight zone scream clip -- fade to black --
ôó
At the same time, there are a lot of business managers who try to push the back end of the performance envelope. DOS was never intended to be a multitasking, multiuser, networked, real-time, secure OS, but there are plenty of business out there trying to use it that way.
In my few years of software support, I have been asked by clients to help get their ragged old store computers working after the systems have died. I've seen 15 year-old computers that were not Y2K compatible still being used (proprietary, not PC-based, and the only source of parts are from other dead machines). I've seen computer networks using coax cable held together with tape so old that the tape crumbled when touched, causing the cable to fall apart and the network to crash. I have seen a huge, mission-critical database whose interface is an old ASCII terminal emulator that does not use a mouse interface at all and interprets "CNTL-C" as "Reboot." I've seen little AT boxes that have been sitting and working on the desk so long that there are clods of dust pouring out of every hole in the case, including the floppy drives.
I have to agree that the seller would always like for the buyer to upgrade frequently, and Intel is the seller in this case. I just want to point out that sometimes, the buyer needs to listen to him.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Your mouse cordless by any chance as well? - mine "slows itself down" and stutters after not using it for a while...
(logitech mx 700)
Its all about foced obsolescence. Mechanical things break, but electronics don't, so therefore to force new purchases they create new improved standards. The only thing fast CPU's and fancy Graphics cards have done is made it easier to write more abstracted code at a higher level. ALL SLOP!! whatever happened to small fast assembly. Now we have virtual machines running code, how crazy!
I agree entirely. It reminds me of Vietnam. We would give the south vietnamese boats, but they had no concept of preventative maintenance so they were unreliable at best. Same goes for computers. I have 486SX processors that still do their job admiarably, up to my highest box (athlon 1800+) that does well where it is stationed at the primary wife desktop position. I to this day have a Pentium 133 alongside my main desktop for dos gaming. It may not be the fastest runner at the track, but last time I checked, Monkey Island didn't run any better on my Pentium II than it did on that pentium 133.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The Print This Article URL has the article as one long clean simple relatively standard relatively undecorated web page. It's the one you want.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Today's computers have almost nothing in them that was available 2 years ago no less twenty. The core of a computer is the north bridge chipset. This is where most of the speed is determined and most of the cost comes from. This is where we have DDR Ram, 533 MHz Front side busses, and AGP 8x. Nothing here remotely resembles a PC from 20 years ago. Sure, computers still have a version of the keyboard port they used 20 years ago. We still use it because it's really good at being a keyboard port.
The PCI section was funny. In one breath the article said that PCI express is an evolution from PCI that is invisible to software. The quote was: "mainly a hardware change that will result in simpler motherboard and peripheral designs". Then 5 lines down the article said that when PCI Express is adopted "a whole new class of PC will emerge." Yea, and that class will be slightly different than the class before just like always.
As far as the claims that the hard drive attachment technology hasn't changed much in the last 20 years it's very hard to find anything in modern IDE that existed back in the PC. The physical signaling is very different, the controller is on the drive now, there is a protocol (ATA) running on top of the bus, the addressing has completely changed. Iâ(TM)d say the biggest change with IDE came back around 1993 when ATA was developed to run on top of it. I am a great fan of SerialATA but it is just an evolutionary change in the physical communications layer. That's one of the best things about it, that it is compatible with the "legacy" architecture and yet the article raves about it and then laughably backes it up by saying that the first serial ATA drive out was "quieter and cooler-running than its classic ATA counterparts" Pure fluff.
As for the floppy, it is certainly time for something to be done about it and yet next to no work has been done on a replacement. The floppy disk is a random read-write bootable removable medium that every PC operating system natively supports. There is no other device that can claim that. CD Burners should have replaced the floppy years ago but the manufacturers never got together and built a new standardized low-level interface. Even bootable CD's still emulate a floppy disk and the boot image is limited to the size of a 2.88 MB floppy. The floppy replacement is an issue that now *needs* to be addressed and yet the articleâ(TM)s suggestion is to simply leave it out without anything to replace it's unique functionality.
Every once in a while these fluff articles pop up. "Soon computers will be as simple, cheap and as easy to use as your phone" they spout "and all they need to do is leave out all that old stuff that you don't really need". The thing they seem to miss is that it has already happened. You can go down to the store and buy a nice legacy-free computer with none of those useless 20 year old keyboard ports or dumb serial ports and it's cheap and easy to use and it's a palm pilot and it sucks for doing what computers are good at. There are all kinds of "legacy-free" computers out there, Ipaq, Tivo, smart phones, there's even those super-cool 3com Audreyâ(TM)s that are all the rage because they are legacy-free
Legacy free usually means not compatible with the old stuff and for a computer that means it's less flexible and thus less powerfull and less desirable. There is a *huge* amount of effort that has gone into designing and supporting these "legacy" systems and to suggest that because it's old it should go is to forget a fundamental truth in the PC industry:
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I had to hunt and peck for a mousepad that the optical mouse liked. I'd been using a piece of glass, which of course made it insane. (Ha, mouse, be glad I didn't give you a mirror!) It didn't like my regular ordinary mouse pad, either. I then tried a plain white piece of paper; progress, but still not good. Further experimentation showed that its very fave surface is beige enamel like a standard computer case (same as my keyboard drawer). Next best was brown corrugated cardboard. (Brown?? Cardboard??!)
:)
So yeah, I've already been down that road... when I get a chance, I'll cut a chunk out of a dead case, and use that, since the mouse loves it so much.
Finding a surface the picky thing enjoys fixed movement problems, but did nothing for the occasional laggy moment (when it takes several seconds to decide it heard me moving or clicking) or lockup. When it locks, mouse and keyboard will be frozen solid, but if a program has an operation in progress, it continues to completion. So I'm guessing it's confusing hell outta the physical ports, not the OS or CPU. Hence my initial thrust toward "is this a USB to PS/2 *adapter* issue??
My WinBoxen lock up seldom to never, so any such incident stands out
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Nope, not cordless (I can always tell some lag with a cordless mouse or kb, and it makes me nuts).
That's interesting what you say, tho, because I've heard of other people with cordless LT mice who thought they slowed down after being used a while. Wonder if the LT cordless driver has a memory leak?
Logitech drivers have sucked since day one of the DOS era, and from what I've seen they've not improved much since then. I've pretty much forbidden my clients from using 'em, because I got tired of dealing with the chronic conflicts. Too bad, since the hardware itself seems quite durable.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
On the other hand, legacy ports have the advantage that the drivers usually work, and the hardware is either documented or old enough that it's been reverse-engineered if anybody cared about it. USB is another opportunity for manufacturers to put out documentation that says "Here's what you tell Microsoft Word to use this scanner" "Here's how you set Photoshop to use your camera" instead if "here's the set of messages the box sends" or "It's TCP/IP, it's port 31337, have a good time".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
this is getting offtopic, but i like your commments on fox , i would give you a mod point +1 if i had any I am having troubble finding info on an MTSAM64GZ MICRON BOARD that i have. it has legasy stuff so most can be figured out. non legasy + no documents = sol
yeah, we could use intel's proprietary BIOS replacement..
:
:
Or we could use open firmware
http://playground.sun.com/1275/
Or we can use linux to boot a computer
http://www.linuxbios.org/index.html
Personally I hate not having hardware serial ports on a computer, I love serial because it is so cheap and easy to interface hardware to the computer. And even USB serial is not the solution because that adds millisecond delays to the data and signal flow.
My MX700 is the best mouse I've ever had. I've used many, all Microsoft mice before, going back to the straight-sided ones, then IntelliMice, then Intelli's with wheels, then a cordless, then an optical, and finally the MX700. Stutters? Slows down? I've never experienced that. It does start flashing the optical sensor after several minutes of non-use to save battery power, but it turns it back on full time when you use it again.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Most laptops (I'd bet 80%+, think business) are dual use travel/desk machines. Those desks tend to have printers on them. Also it's been my experience that printers are replaced less often than PCs. I've gone through several PC upgrade cycles since I bought my Epson Colour printer (the orginal) in 1993. Still using the printer. This means legacy demand will mean the continued inclusion on printer ports for a long time. Contrast to say external modems. I fire up my old 150Baud everyone once and a while to scare the kids and watch the lights but I sure ain't using it for work.
The problem you are describing is a WINDOWS problem. Not a USB problem. PS/2 update timing is HORRIBLY slow vs USB. When I use a mouse on a PC the framerate is always clearly visiable because it so low.
Macintoshes have USB implemented in the open firmware and do not have this problem.
Even if the whole damned OS is frozen my mouse still moves on the screen.
usb mouse -> open firmware -> video card
Open firmware is the way to go.
And yes RS232, floppys, ISA, PS/2 and floppys all need to die.
If joe-user wants a floppy let them buy a external floppy.
Most people wont and it dies off.
Otherwise there will always be someone who wants the damned thing.
Floppys are SLOW hold SMALL amounts of data and are not dependable.
I hope USB keyring cards take over.
Yes, USB mice suck on windows.
Everyone in the PC world i know that has one uses it with a PS/2 adapter.
No, I am not a mac freak.
I use Windows, Linux, BSD and OS X all on a regular basis.
no place to plug in a 100-pin IDE2000... well, that's good, since there's no such thing... however, unfortunately you probably don't have anywhere to plug in the new 4(?)-pin Serial IDE, which _is_ the actual 'new' thing [that is, the one with a different connector]
The article doesn't mention Firewire/1394, Hypertransport, Infiniband, Serial ATA, etc.
Actually it does mention Serial ATA as the replacement for ATA. I don't know why it doesn't mention Firewire which at least gets plenty of press these days that a lot of non-computer types know about it.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
re: 100 pin IDE2000: it was a fake example. created a better picture than "foo drive" or "bar device"
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Drivers? For a mouse? Specialized, non-general drivers for a HID? Why in the world would you need those? That's like needing drivers for a (real, hardware) modem... And yes, I'm being serious.
That said, if you're in Windows and you've decided to use the Logitech drivers to add features to your mouse, try ditching them and installing the MS Intellimouse drivers. I use them for my old-style Logitech Cordless Optical mouse once in a great while, and they seem to do the job properly.
And most people don't need wheelbarrows anymore.
It's time to get rid of the 'geek' connectors on PCs. If you want legacy ports you can get an add-in card with them or a USB shim.
While we're at it, is there a chance we can get a new kind of floppy controller? I think it's lame how my Athlon slows to a crawl when I'm formatting a floppy. Maybe serializing floppy access and adding a 32K buffer would fix things.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I will look for the stuff... hopefully it works (otherwise an anonymous "w4r3z d00d" buddy of mine can get me OS X for bootup purposes (might be overkill on a 90 mhz PPC tho).
:)
By the way. I am interested in that Kawaiinet thingie... leave details as a comment to my journal if necessary
-DaedalusHKX
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Gentoo works on Apple's PowerPC hardware too.
Macs use a CPU called the PowerPC.
"IBM compatible" then!
Macs with G3s have CPUs made by IBM. IBM don't even make CPUs that Windows can run on anymore.
"Intel" then!
What about AMD, Transmeta, Cyrix...
Here's an idea for you:
x86 compatible
Virtual PC on OS X runs Windows 2000 perfectly.
You should have got the PowerBook...
I support the removal of the floppy from the system, along with the serial and parallel ports. I think that floppy support should be piped over USB, and there oughtta be an internal USB header in every PC. You could get legacy ports/drives on 'legacy-free' PCs with an internal USB bus (should you need them).
How cool would it be if there was a 3.5" USB hot-swap bay on every PC that could take a floppy or flashcard reader? You could stick serial-ata connectors in there too for a general-purpose hot-swap bay instead of a rickety old 1980s floppy device.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Seems a computer engineer, a systems analyst, and a programmer were
driving down a mountain when the brakes gave out. They screamed down the
mountain, gaining speed, but finally managed to grind to a halt, more by
luck than anything else, just inches from a thousand foot drop to jagged
rocks. They all got out of the car:
The computer engineer said, "I think I can fix it."
The systems analyst said, "No, no, I think we should take it
into town and have a specialist look at it."
The programmer said, "OK, but first I think we should get back
in and see if it does it again."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...