OT: A call to arms (sort of)

From: Bill Pechter <pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org>
Date: Sat Jul 3 07:17:28 1999

> Well . . . what could possibly be more "open" than the ISA. It's capable of
> pretty much anything that the PDP-11 could dish out, AND you can get paid
> for taking the boards away from a lot of places. Almost any function you
> care to have is available if you don't want to try to improve on what's
> available, and the structural components are commonly available. The same
> could, I guess, be said of the VME in the smaller form factors. In all my
> years of hardware scrounging, I've never seen any architecture more prolific
> than the ISA, and in that time I've seen maybe a half dozen Q-bus cards for
> cheap. Now, I'm not saying it has be cheap, but you would gather that as
> the primary requirement from what most folks seem so spout about in this
> forum, e.g. "What??! A dollar for a 1956 Rolls, in solid gold! Too much!
> I'll offer a nickel . . ."
>
> Dick

The problem with ISA is lack of interrupt sharing on most boards.
Perhaps if a passive backplane was used and the isa boards were
modified to allow interrupt sharing.

The limited number of IRQ's is a major drag.
The cases and power supplies are cheap, though.

I'd recommend going with VME or Multibus over ISA.

Bill
Received on Sat Jul 03 1999 - 07:17:28 BST