On 01/05/2014 11:33 AM, allison wrote:
If you go into other than PC systems with a PC
mindset, you are likely
universally going to go down the wrong path of beliefs.
The industry in general has suffered from a lack of forward-thinking.
Shugart could have handled the motor issue by using two pins on the
interface (one to turn the spindle motor on; the other to turn it off),
conditioned on drive select--a trivial modification. I suspect Shugart
was still locked in the 8" mindset (AC operated spindle motors running
all the time) to do anything different. IBM's solution was pretty
clever and also did away with the need to change drive-select jumpers.
Hard drives were really a mess. When we started out with the very new
5.25" ST412-interface drives, we offered only two variations a Rodime
7MB and a 14MB model--and they were hard-coded. To our credit,
communication with the driver was done by relative block, not CHS.
After Rodime discontinued the 7 and 14MB models, and sold us 10 and 20MB
models for the same price, we kept the same driver, so 1/3 of the drive
went unused. This was *after* we'd offered the Shugard SA4000-series
14" drives up to, what, 40MB? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The same shortsightedness extended to display resolution, CPU speed
assumptions and just about anything else you can name.
I'll give Apple that one--they tend to think a bit ahead of everyone else.
But we're still lacking in real visionaries.
--Chuck