Rumor has it that Mike Cheponis may have mentioned these words:
>(And, of course, most 486dx2/66 machines used at least an EISA bus [2],
> running 32 bits at 8.33 MHz x two clock edges = 533 Mbits/sec.)
[snip]
>[2] Indispensable PC Hardware Book, 3rd edition, p. 552
[for reference inclusion]
"Most" 486DX2/66's used EISA??? What's your definition of most? That book
of yours has a rather skewed idea of what "most" means.
Now, most "Server" 486's did have EISA AFAIK, but the server machines were
an _extremely_ small portion of the total number of machines in the real
world. (I actually had use of a retired Dell 486DX266 EISA low-end server.
[Low-end being defined as: Adaptec 1542 ISA SCSI interface, non-ECC
memory...] )
Certainly a nice machine, but by no means the most feature-filled server
Dell produced at the time.
The company I worked for at the time had roughly 400-500 486's deployed,
with 75-100 being DX33 or faster. I think 3 machines there had EISA, and
were all servers - not for use as a single-user machine until replaced by a
faster server.
BTW, those machines worked fairly well servicing around 100 users, but only
10-15% were at their desks at any one time - the rest of the machines were
logged in but idle. Of course, with a 400 user 10Mbit (non-switched)
ethernet network & 4 of these servers (the 4th was a PCI P60), by the time
the servers started doing real work & were slowing down, ethernet
collisions pretty much ground everything to a halt.
Two more PCI P60 servers replaced the 3 EISA 486's, and my employer allowed
me to take one home to work on - to replace the 4Mbyte 386SX16 I was
running AutoCad 12 on - and doing renders. Let's just say that 486 was an
extreme improvement. ;-)
(Oh, and the servers were just file-sharing servers running Netware 3.11,
for reference...)
Again, just my $0.02 (CDN, this time) and not worth that...
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig.
If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
Received on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 20:31:41 BST