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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.
I'd rather A free legacy pc any day.
-s
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
BeOS?
That was classic intercourse!
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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 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).
Instructions for navigating the site are on page 2 of the article...
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.
You're full of it. I've got a Sun Ultra 10 at home that uses OpenProm instead of a BIOS. Works great with not only Solaris, but also Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Having *real* firmware instead of the off the shelf hack that IBM did way back when is not an immediate path to TCPA architectures. Having TCPA hardware (which by itself isn't so bad) is a more realistic path.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... 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)
GMFTatsujin
"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 ?
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.
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.
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
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'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...