interesting DEC Pro stuff on eBay

[Dave Mitton]

Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2022 14:03:48 -0400
From: Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net>
To: Chris Zach <cz at alembic.crystel.com>, "cctalk at classiccmp.org"
	<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: interesting DEC Pro stuff on eBay
….

➢ That said, you'd think that DMA would make a 1:1 interleave controller much more feasible.  And Bjoren also mentioned Ethernet.  The DECNA is not to horrible without DMA because you can use its on-board memory directly as host packet buffers, though CT bus based memory is as I recall slower than motherboard memory.  Still, one wonders why they didn't use a correctly designed Ethernet chip like LANCE, either with local memory or with DMA.

	paul

You’d have to ask Bill Duane about that…  He found several dynamic problems with the Intel Ethernet chipset.  He was under NDA to them at one time.
I suspect that the Pro team didn’t ask us and just went with that chip for some other reason.   We obviously regretted that in the long run.

Dave.


Sent from Mail for Windows