NEC asked this sort of question, but apparently at some lower level, the
OS did not know
which slot held which bit of media. There was some level of software, I
think called a MIL that
performed hardware abstraction for the higher-level OS. Its possible
that the MIL had no way
to communicate this info up to the OS level, and any fix would make
large changes to the way
the OS talked to the MIL layer. It was pretty late in the Go game for
that sort of change.
NEC's reaction to this was to abruptly 'kill' the whole program, but I
suspect that this had a lot
to do with 'saving face' over the battery cell issues that also plauged
the project.
So perhaps this all didn't kill Go as a company, it sure left a bad
taste in NEC's mouth where
non-Microsoft operating systems were concerned. I know that people
within NEC had big
plans for non-windows portables back then. It took a very long time
before NEC's portable
products group was comfortable working on anything less than a
conventional clamshell Windows
box. Even the Windows CE based MobilePro program was kept at arms
distance until it began to
sell fairly well. But even then, it was not treated as a main-stream
product line.
Sellam Ismail wrote:
>On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Bob Shannon wrote:
>
>>In the end, Go's assesement was that Penpoint would have to be
>>fundementally re-engineered to fix this issue. The changes needed would
>>be to dramatic that the project was canceled. This was a bug they just
>>could not fix, and without the ability to use a PCMCIA modem and
>>data-card, NEC's customer for the VersaPad would be forced to abandon
>>the Penpoint application and retool for a Windows for Pen Computing
>>application. The result of this, and some really major issues with early
>>Ni-MHD battery cells was enough to kill the complete VersaPad project.
>>
>
>Why not just label the virtual PCMCIA card (the "book" icon) with the slot
>number?
>
>Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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>
Received on Sat Oct 05 2002 - 09:21:00 BST