29 Apr
2010
29 Apr
'10
3:10 p.m.
On 29 Apr 2010 at 17:42, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Or more specifically, _have_ ISA slots. I have a
motherboard (Asus
A7V) that's 10 years old and has only 5 PCI and an AGP.
ISA motherboards are still around--and pricey. Soyo made/makes a
Socket 478 P4 board with 3 ISA slots. I tend to hang onto PIII
motherboards with more than one ISA slot. Most are Slot 1 types and
I've had lousy results upgrading them with Slotkets.
Quite, but most of that was purged from the market
when machines
started getting faster than about 16MHz. For 286s and 386s, there was
the "Turbo" button. I don't recall many 486s having an active Turbo
switch, and I don't remember seeing any Pentium systems that could be
slowed down that easily (though you could disable cache and pump up
wait-states and such in the BIOS).
I've got P1 and 486 boards with turbo switch and LED headers, though
I'm not certain what effect they have, other than illuminating or
extinguishing the Turbo LED.
One nice aspect of the ISA bus is that it's simple to interface to
and write DOS drivers for. PCI is not nearly so nice and USB on DOS
is a real pain. Windows/Linux usually requires a fair amount of work
in the driver department.
So I keep a stock of ISA prototyping boards around.
--Chuck