Due to massive amounts of caffeine & sleep deprivation, A.R. Duell said:
>Or look at the PDP11's Unibus (or Q-bus). It's elegant. It works. And
>there are no IRQ or DMA conflicts. The PC bus is a kludge from start to
>finish. If you read the PC/AT TechRef (I have), you'll find there is an
>official way to share IRQ lines in a PC/AT - which IBM then ignored when
>writing the BIOS. And that's what became the standard.
I can expect a kludge from a hacker... because even if it's weird, it works
when it's not supposed to. That takes a lot of imagination.
A kludge of this magnitude from the number of people assigned to design the
expensive IBM machines of that day is a crime!
>I remember demonstrating my Tandy CoCo-3 in 1988 to some PC-goon or
>other. He had a 386 PC running MS-DOS. I had a 2 mHz 6809 running OS-9. He
>was totally amazed that 'that little video game' could have several
>programs running at once, displaying their output in different windows
>(something his PC didn't do at that time), and that I could even log on to
>my machine from a remote terminal.
Thumbs up everywhere! I have one (and still use it at least weekly) and
despite it's (now I'm getting technical for the sake of conversation) 1.78
Mhz clock speed, I pitted it against a True-blue IBM 286-10 AT machine in
several benchmarks (which I wrote) which included number & string sorting,
prime number creation and getting the factors of a number and..... WON!
People don't realize that the Intel x86 chips are *highly* inefficient,
especially in their addressing and branching instructions, which gave my
CoCo3 a speed advantage not equaled until I bought my 386SX16... even then
it was a close race, but I couldn't get good games for my CoCo anymore...
So whenever I wanted to play, I had VGA. When I wanted to work, gimme OS-9
any day!
Keep on CoCoing!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
>
>> That is one of the reasons I appreciate the early micros so much....it's
>> amazing what was done by programmers and such in such tight constraints.
Take
>> for example the Atari 800...this is a 2mhz 6502 cpu with 48k RAM and a full
>> Basic, with full-screen editing, in an 8k ROM. This system amazes me at
the
>> animations and such I've seen on it at times. It's version of Frogger is
>> great, and I typed in a Basic program from 'Compute!' that displayed the
Atari
>> logo with 128 colors onscreen at once. I think modern day systems could
still
>> learn quite a few things from the earlier ones.
>
>I don't play computer games that much, but IMHO the games from 10-15 years
>ago are much more fun than the modern ones. OK, so now we have 3D rendered
>graphics, real sound effects, but no 'plot' - nothing to do except blast
>everything in sight. I personally prefer a good text-only adventure with
>some logic behind it, and no sound.
>
>Maybe I'm just totally unusual...
>
>
>>
>> Jeff jeffh_at_eleventh.com
>
>
>--
>-tony
>ard12_at_eng.cam.ac.uk
>The gates in my computer are AND,OR and NOT, not Bill
>
>
--
Roger Merchberger | Everyone complained to me to change my .sig,
Programmer, NorthernWay | but no-one could recommend something better.
zmerch_at_northernway.net | So you'll have to put up with this *junk*
| until I find some new wisdom to share.
Received on Thu Apr 10 1997 - 16:18:57 BST