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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.
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.
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
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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
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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)
page 2. once you're there, links to page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 should work as well. looks like some kind of scripting error on their part. the extra '/' character was borking access to the next pages.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
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.
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.