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.
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
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
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
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.
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 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.
- 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.
"[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
"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
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!
Aren't they, like, 30 years old? Can we REALLY do without those? ;)
You are not the customer.
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
...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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
... seems to have a qwerty keyboard.
I have to wonder how they expect to have legacy-free machines while there are still people running around with huge phallic vibrating instruments?
Easy. Throw out serial or ps/2 dildo. Replace with firewire or usb dildo.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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)
evolution n 1: a process in which something passes by degrees to a more advanced or mature stage; "the development of his ideas took many years"; "the evolution of Greek civilization"; "the slow development of her skill as a writer" [syn: development] 2: the sequence of events involved in the evolutionary development of a species or taxonomic group of organisms [syn: phylogeny, phylogenesis]
Evolution is not just applicable to living things. Where do you think Darwin got the name?
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
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
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 ?
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.
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?
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
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?
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 got a few results from Google: usb serial adapter mac
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.'"
What I never understood was this:
-Industry is so keen on getting us to abandon our PS/2 keyboard and Centronics parallel ports.
-In theory, fewer connectors and less space taken on the chipset components should be cheaper
-Yet, the only "legacy-free" parts I see are either in OEM systems (and generally not for individual consumption), or sold to enthusiasts as wow special at a high price.
I can get decent full-legacy Athlon mainboards at USD 50-70. Why should I pay twice as much if not more for a legacy-free board, and actually get LESS?
Aside: if you're freeing all that mainboard space, can't you find something better to do with it than 144 USB ports? The whole point of USB is that you can use hubs and daisy-chaining so one or two ports should be enough.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
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
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...
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!
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
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