8-bit IDE

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Wed Apr 19 17:18:37 2000

On Wed, Apr 19, 2000 at 08:59:40AM -0600, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> Gee! I thought I had trimmed the excess from the message I sent.

And yet, even in *this* message, you included 100% of Allison's message
to which you were replying. PLEASE just trim it to the paragraphs you're
actually addressing in your reply, some people are paying per packet to
receive this list and anyway it's a real pain to have to page through
many screens of text trying to find the parts that are new.

> All the
> while, I've been harping on this notion that there must be SOME drives that
> provided this 8-bit option, else it wouldn't have been in the standard at
> all.

Well, for that matter, the SCSI-2 standard tells us that wide drives have
the signals spread across *both* a 50- *and* a 68-pin cable. But good luck
finding an actual drive like that. Some standards are obviously the result
of bickering in the committee and are too silly to implement for real.

Similarly, the 8-bit ISA market had shriveled up by the late 80s so it's
certainly understandable that manufacturers building new drives (especially
the really fancy 2.5" portable ones) wouldn't bother with an 8-bit mode.
Who would need it?

> Frankly, I wish the current generation XILINX software would support the
> 2000 and 3000 series parts, but the former was end-of-lifed some 10 years
> ago and the 3000 has been replaced with the 3000-A series and 3100 series.
> The 3030 would make my job MUCH simpler, but I just can't use one due to
> software incompatibility.

All the more reason to use MSI TTL when it's a good fit (and appropriate to
computers from that era).

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Wed Apr 19 2000 - 17:18:37 BST

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