17 Oct
2011
17 Oct
'11
1:33 p.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
I can see this coming full-circle. For awhile
there, the trend was to
dump EVERYTHING on the single slow-as-molasses-anyway x86 processor in
the box; clueless designers who couldn't see the big picture did things
like putting printer handling (all rasterization, etc) and modem DSP in
the host processor. Remember "winprinters" and "winmodems"? Now
we're
"inventing" distributed processing again. It's about time. ;)
Was that really 'clueless'? I always understood it to be a cost thing; a
hardware designer could implement a modem or printer for far less $$$ if
all the processing work was done by the host system's CPU - but they could
still sell it as a modem or printer indistinguishable on the packaging from
a better product (which did have its own local processing), so long as
their software would run under the host machine's OS.
I think they saw the big picture all too clearly, and saw a way of
maximizing returns by peddling junk that the public would happily buy
anyway (this goes back to our discussion about how people often seem to
*expect* computers to be buggy and sometimes slow down for no apparent
reason. They wouldn't necessarily associate it with the modem or printer,
and even if they did it'd be OK because "that's just the way computers
are").
cheers
Jules