Busses vs no busses

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Mon May 8 22:29:32 2000

One of the most amazing things I've witnessed in the computer evolution
is the growth, and death, of busses. Some, like Q-bus and S-100 are
pretty simple, others like SBus and the switching fabric that
constitutes the SparcServer 490 are much more complex.

When asked once why I prefer the Q-bus 11's and Vaxen my answer is
always because I can get lots of I/O to do neat things for those busses.
(I'm writing a program for the PDP-8 to control an LED sign using a
couple of 12bit parallel i/o cards. )

But the trend in PC's has gone to fewer and fewer "slots" and soon will
be no slots. I thought that the bus was dead until I realized that USB
has the same bandwidth as Q-bus and FireWire has much better bandwidth.
So presumably we'll see some interesting I/O devices that use these
busses in the future.

--Chuck
Received on Mon May 08 2000 - 22:29:32 BST