Classic busses (was Re: Whats a reasonable collection?)

From: Ethan Dicks <ethan_dicks_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu Jun 28 14:25:21 2001

--- Chad Fernandez <fernande_at_internet1.net> wrote:
> Well, I never heard of Zorro, and I wouldn't know Turbochannel if I saw
> it. I suspect PCI doesn't use jumpers because most cards are, "Plug and
> Play". Besides, PCI wasn't around when Microchannel was king of the
> corporate world.

Zorro is the Amiga bus - there are two card sizes/form factors, Zorro
ZorroII. I have seen a "sit-on-the-top" Zorro expander for the Amiga 1000,
but almost anything people are likely to see are ZorroII cards. They
require a ROM or a PAL simulating a ROM to provide a few nybbles of info
about the card - the vendor and type code, what kind of I/O or memory
space it needs, etc. That's the Commodore "AUTOCONFIG" spec which predates
Plug-n-Play by quite a bit.

Turbochannel is the bus I've seen most often with DEC RISC workstations,
although I think they were not the only vendor to use it. The MIPS boxes
and the early Alpha boxes were Turbochannel. Mostly, it was used for
frame buffers, but I think there were one or two non-graphic Turbochannel
cards.

-ethan



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Received on Thu Jun 28 2001 - 14:25:21 BST

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