9 Oct
2005
9 Oct
'05
9:03 a.m.
Subject: Re: PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware
From: Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net>
Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 11:00:30 -0500
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
I've worked with a few machines that had NO ISA slots and the
solution was PCI cards as they were available to do the job.
With many of the cheaper all_on_one mainboards it was convenient to
disable board level resources like video or sound to use a better
or more convenient PCI or even ISA board. In some cases I did that
avoid the sound system they used because it was impossible to get
a good driver for the OS in question at that time. I never regarded
that as a big deal or even difficult.
Allison
This doesn't work well when you have a recent
enough machine that it
doesn't have ISA slots. Heck, I've got UNIX boxes from 1996 (getting
nearly on topic now) that have PCI but no ISA slots.
Well, PCI was and is perceived as a 'good thing' and was never
PC-specific. It's no surprise that UNIX vendors adopted PCI but never
touched ISA. (didn't SGI have ISA, or maybe EISA slots, in some of
their workstations?)
I don't have any machines 'recent' enough that they don't have ISA
slots, for the record. And, in fact, the particular Dell Optiplexes
that I continue to drone on about have a LOT of ISA slots if the
motherboard is installed in the mini-tower case. More, even, than we
had available on a stock PC-AT once you tied up a bunch of the slots
with disk controller, video, network card, etc.