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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
LOL. BTW, a legacy-free PC wouldn't be legacy free if (a) it ran a DOS-type OS (including Win9x, OS/2, NT, XP, ...) or (b) it had an x86-class CPU. Legacy-free? You'd be more likely to find an LF MAC than an LF PC.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
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.
Some Compaqs (a Presario if my memory serves me correctly) used to do this. Of course, there was no easy way to get the necessary image for the BIOS partiton, so a dead hard drive lead directly to a dead computer.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
"Who would buy a computer without a keyboard?"
I have four of 'em.
--
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.
Legacy free PCs... ...Wow...
Does this really mean we can actually, finally rid ourselves from Von Neumann's bottle neck?
Yes, but with anti-lock, disc brakes, electronically controlled suspension, and tires that weigh half what their counterparts just ten years ago did...
We're still using Turing machines, true, but without tapes...
That having been said it's a lot easier to slap RS232 on a device than it is USB... but that's just a question of time before the USB chips become as cheap/easy as UART's...
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
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)
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.
no.
The 1st mpu (micro processing unit, a cpu in one chip) designed to run high level languages was the 8 bit 6809. By then Intel has firmly defined the 8080 instruction set which is still with us today. Other CPUs that were designed for high level languages include the AT&T 32000 and NCR16016. These processors had instructions for building stack frames and pulling elements out of structures that are on the stack or heap. Things like the Sparc were designed to do a single operation very fast with the expectation that the compiler could generate all the needed instructions and optimize them. RISC wasn't designed to be easy to for the compiler to generate code, it was designed for the compiler to be able to generate code that ran fast. A compiler for a an AT&T 3b2 would run much faster than a compiler for a Sun sparc at about the same speed because it didn't have nearly as much work todo.
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...
I have said and will repeat that legacy!=BadThing. Linux is based on proven technology, and improves upon its predecessors. That is why it's as good as it is. And it doesn't hurt that there are versions that can be packed onto 1.44 MB floppies.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
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:
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