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.

Comments

Unfortunately...

[Millennium]

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.

Yes, well, here is my experience...

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I bought the Abit AT7-Max Legacy free motherboard. No parallel, serial ports, no ps/2 ports, just 8 usb and 2 firewire. It did have a floppy connector though. Guess what. Trying to install Linux was a COMPLETE nightmare because of the lack of ps2 ports. I tried absolutely everything, giving keyboard and mouse control to the bios and afterwards to the os did not solve the problem. I managed to install Mandrake 9.1 but Gentoo and Debian (my first choices for that computer) were a HUGE no go. At a point I even thought of compiling a USB HID enabled kernel at my main machine and boot off it on the at7 but I thought "bah" and went with Mandrake.

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!

Re:Yes, well, here is my experience...

[Reziac]

My observation over the past few years has been that the "no legacy hardware" thing is indeed driven by the changes M$ makes to their specs for hardware to be "Windows compliant" (or whatever their term for it is). Such as -- to be XP-certified, the machine cannot have a user-accessable hard-power switch (if one exists, it has to be on the BACK of the case). M$ wanted to make the spec include "no user access to the BIOS" but I guess that didn't fly (yet). I read this from a list of specs on M$'s *own* site, so it's not just some tinfoil hat spouting.

It makes me think that this entire "no more legacy hardware" concept is more about taking control over the hardware away from the user (thereby making it -- as you discovered -- less usable for alternative OSs, not to mention more friendly to DRM-in-hardware) than it is about ditching old tech that's "holding us back".

I'll take my interchangeable legacy devices and complete lack of integrated anything over a technological jump that nonetheless reduces both broad-spectrum usability and user options.

OpenFirmware compatible

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Alas, everyone wants backwards compatibility

[magarity]

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.

I like BIOS

[kommisar]

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 computing? Apple's way ahead, as usual

[Gryffin]

I've been running a legacy-free computer since 1987 when I bought my first Mac.

• PS/2? Gee, where did IBM think of that? maybe the ADB ports on a Mac. They even used the same connectors as Apple. Of course, in the Apple version, keyboard & mouse ports were interchangable, daisy-chainable (plug the mouse into the KB, f'rinstance), and supported a variety of other devices as well (joysticks, hardware dongles, etc.).
• Plug 'n' Pray? Not on a Macintosh. I've never had to set an interrupt or mave a jumper on a Mac *ever*. It's always just worked.
• ISA too slow? Apple used the faster Nubus for the Mac, then later switched to PCI before the x86 crowd.
• BIOS too primitive? Apple helped develop OpenFirmware, which sounds a bit like Intel's EFI to me.
• 4.7MB/s ATA too slow? Apple had 10MB/s (later 20MB/s) SCSI in the Mac for ages, then switched to ATA/33 once it caught up in speed.
• Floppy drive? What's that? Apple dropped 'em years ago. Even before CD-R became cheap, Syquest or Zip drives were ubiquitous on Macs. They could even boot off them. Amazing concept, huh, booting off a removable drive?

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.