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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
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.
**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...
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
This company sells machines with only modern ports on its motherboards.
audio I/O, USB, Firewire, 10/100 ethernet (10/100/1000 on powerbook/powermac), VGA, DVI/ADC, modem.
No sign of those rs-232, or parallel ports. No ps2 or keyboard ports either.
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 wish that more vendors offered them, but they don't. The ones that do, do so at exorbitant prices.
Aye, there's the rub.
The original IBM PC had the advantage of being standardized and allowed other vendors to implement those same standards.
While there's some hope that the legacy-free PC will implement interfaces that conform closely to freely-available published standards (USB, IEEE1394), there's always this temptation: companies (Rambus) would love to own a standard and just have the checks come rolling in.
The success of breaking PCs free of legacy hardware will hinge on whether similarly-unencumbered new standards are there to take the place of the old ones.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Yeah, I always heard the anecdote "Microsoft users hate unix because it essentially hasn't changed much in 30 years. Unix people love it for this exact reason", or something like that, implying that age = stability and reliability.
I don't see where legacy hardwar is a bad thing. I have an athlon XP 1800+ and a bunch of fairly new hardware, but I still use my ps2 ports, my paralell port, and my com port on a daily basis.
I think it's a good thing to have a lowest common denominator when dealing with hardware. I think it's a good idea to always have the floppy drive to fall back on.
I ran into an instance just a little while ago where I had to have one. I tried to make my primary hard drive the drive which was on a Raid controller. For some reason, windows XP didn't have the driver for my onboard promise ata100 raid chipset, and couldn't find the drive. So, in the installation procedure, i had to load an external driver ("press F6 to load a 3rd party scsi or raid driver"). The only option for loading the driver was a floppy - can't do it from a CD (or at least i couldn't figure out how to)
But, it's nice knowing that, if nothing else, you have ps2 ports for any old keyboard and a floppy drive for booting emergencies. Proven technology is a good thing. Besides, why throw out an essentially good design? Yeah, as the article says it's all based on the AT spec, but, we've gone beyond 4MB of ram, we're no longer using AT keyboards, we've ditched the com port mouse, we're using 15 pin SVGA monitor plugs instead of the oldskool 9-pin, our ram isn't 30 pin or 72 pin simms anymore, we're using 168pin sdram, and even that's on it's way out, in favor of 184 pin ddr. The BNC network connections are gone, as are the 15 pin connections. We're using ATX soft-off power supplies now. I haven't used an ISA slot in 4 years, and it's been 2 since I've owned a motherboard with one on it (well, that's a daily user anyway).
I say, let these things work themselves out. Compared to the 1984 picture in that article, most of our computers are legacy-free - think about how many pieces of hardware you have right now that would connect to a 286. My speakers? My floppy? Mabey the hard drive? Yeah, that's about it.
It's not about creating a legacy-free PC. It's about the continual evolution of the existing PC into the next big changes. We're doing just fine so far, why bash the basis we've been going on as we evolve for 20 years? It's got us this far, let's ride it out a little further, see where it goes.
~Will
sig?
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.
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
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.