On Wednesday 20 April 2005 11:20, Ethan Dicks wrote: Years ago, as a VAR, I used Futuredomain SCSI controllers. You will probably want to check that they are supported by whatever OS you are going to use... I'm there at least once a week - and know all of the management well. They are honest folks and have been in business for 17 years or more. Cheers, Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"

On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 14:20 -0400, Ethan Dicks wrote: They were eventually gobbled up by Adaptec I believe - in fact a lot of the later boards have Adaptec chipsets and identify themselves as Adaptec boards. By all accounts they're decent enough boards though. (Funnily enough I've got one of their 16 bit ISA boards sitting on the floor here awaiting a new home) cheers Jules

Future Domain started out in Orange county in a small office at Edinger and Redhill in Santa Ana / Tustin. At least when I ran across them while I was in the SCSI / SASI business. Early on there were Future Domain, Alltech various controllers with 53xx NCR controllers glued on them, and the Adaptec early 1542's. There was also a semiserious contender out in Pomona, called ADSI with an engineer whose name I forget that finally put out a small line of contollers and converters. There was also a company called OMTI (One more time Inc), who was eventually snarfed up by SMC, I think tha had some scsi to various devices controllers. They also made a host adapter. These were early, because at the time VLSI had not shot it's wad, and I think they made these SCSI chips up on contract. VLSI also at the time was making one of the follow on to Chip's and Technologies AT support set, and were trying to do video adapters. C&T had a huge lead for many months, and I think that VLSI was the first out with a much cheaper alternative, with their 5 chip set. Anyway, Future Domain eventually made a controller along the lines of the Adaptec 1542, and eventually similar to the 2940. The main thing about a controller like this is that the chip may do DMA, but the main SCSI state machine software is contained and executed by the main processor. This chip only runs the SCSI protocol from phase to phase, with DMA in the betters ones. Cheaper ones used the AT's method of doing programmed I/O and could only do interrupts of the AT to get the main processor (286, 386, 486, and early non pci 586 or Pentiums). This one probably has DMA, which means the I/O could run somewhat faster, however Bus Mastering controllers usually have a processor integrated in them. the 1542 and the F. D. equivalent, and later the 2930 (future domains last controller with an Adaptec badge on it) and the 2940's both have processors to run the Scsi Initiator state machine, and do most of the work once a crude program is downloaded into them. Jim This would have been long before Adaptec bough Ethan Dicks wrote:

On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 19:52, Jules Richardson wrote: ?2.99 here, until some time tomorrow morning: http://www.scan.co.uk/todayonly/ (about 3/4 the way down the page) -- Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence at ljw.me.uk Ph +44(0)1869-811059 http://www.ljw.me.uk