3 May
2012
3 May
'12
11:25 a.m.
Well, it's a matter of modularity. I like
compactness to a point,
especially if I'm trying to make something small. But if I want
reliability, I'll use separate USB and Ethernet PHYs.
I haev never understood this love of making thigs as small as possible.
OK, I don;t want a pocket calcualtor that actually takes up a 19" rack
cabinet, but for soemthign that I don't have to carry about, I don't care
if it's a half-rack-width thing, a 3U rack module, a 6U rack module. etc.
In fact things that are too smal lare often difficult to use because the
cotnrols are too close together. Iam not even going to mention repairing
them..
In a differnet context, I much prefer the handling of a Nikon F camera
over an Olympus OM series, for similar reasons. Things can be too small
to handle easily.
[1] Although not always. The serial port in my
HP9817 was defective when
I got the machine and I found that not only were the buffers damaged, so
was the 8250 serial chipe (yes, an 8250 in a 68K machine. Odd...). I am
not sure what had happened to the machine.
Odd indeed. Lots of 68K machines used 8350s, but that's a very
different chip.