18 Oct
2006
18 Oct
'06
12:54 p.m.
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
I'm pretty sure that it's been a fundamental PC feature from day 1,
annoyingly. Presumably IBM took the view that serial consoles were for minis
and mainframes, and that a PC was a desktop with a screen and so should always
have a video board (even if it was text-only)
[wonder what the first application that treated a PC as a server was? Quite
possibly some form of BBS software, but it'd be interesting to know]
I've never personally found SCSI to be all that hard to deal with.
Nor me. The trick for me was always to buy good-quality cables and
terminators, and to adhere to maximum cable lengths. I've had far more trouble
getting pairs of IDE devices playing well together than I've ever had getting
SCSI stuff working.
cheers
J.
--
If you've ever wondered how you get triangles from a cow
You need buttermilk and cheese, and an equilateral chainsaw
Of course,
even the original 5150 had a serial port--most people just tend
not to think of it as such. Namely, the keyboard interface. When the AT
came along, it was fully bidirectional.
Interesting thought. I have some XT-class hardware around still, but it's
been so long since I've messed with any of that I can't remember -- do you
_have to_ have video or other cards in there to get past POST? Makes me wonder how well SCSI would have fared had it
been hot-pluggable
from the start, as that seems to be the main benefit of USB (even if the
Microsoft guys can't seem to get the software side of it right!)
You're
forgetting how much voodoo factor there was to SCSI.