17 Oct
2011
17 Oct
'11
11:08 p.m.
On Oct 17, 2011, at 4:33 PM, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com>
wrote:
Dave McGuire wrote:
Yes, perhaps you're right, they were being sleazy rather than clueless. That's
just as depressing. :-(
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA
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").