On 05/07/2018 08:52 PM, Ken Seefried via cctalk wrote:
EISA is a nice-to-have, especially if you want to run multiple interfaces
(much better irq handling than ISA) and/or higher speed stuff like FDDI,
100Mb enet, T-3/ATM, etc. Or you already have a cache of EISA cards.
That said (and this is x86 specific, because there's a whole HPPA EISA
world I don't know a lot about with all sorts of weird stuff):
Yep, that's what I'm thinking about doing.
I had a cache of EISA cards before a ~1000 mile move. Now I'm looking
at how much it might cost to reacquire a small portion of them and I'm
weeping.
1) PCI does a better job......usually.
"usually" LOL
2) EISA motherboards, desktop machines and fun/exotic network cards seem
to be getting increasingly rare and ridiculously expensive, at least
on evil auction sites. On the other hand, 10Mb EISA ethernet and scsi
cards are chump change.
Yep. Part of my cache was NICs and SCSI HBAs.
I also had some more exotic multi-port serial cards, with breakout
cables / boxes.
3) There are some interesting network things that just don't seem to
have ever been made for EISA. For example, I've never heard of a fibre
ethernet or HSSI card for EISA.
I want to say that I've seen EISA fiber Ethernet cards. But I may be
misremembering.
4) I think EISA limits you to 386 through PII CPUs (and probably PII as
a PPro Overdrive upgrade outside of a server class machine). At least,
I can't think of a P3 machine with EISA. YMMV.
I think that CPU range perfectly encompass the OSs that I'd want to run too.
5) The video card options are a bit thin on EISA. The Compaq QVision VGA
is common as dirt (and just as dumb), but outside of that the ELSA Winner
and ATI Mach32 are the only "real" graphics cards I seem to see often.
There's probably some awful TIGA boards out there somewhere. Go PCI.
~chuckle~
I'm just after 2D, 256 color, 800x600, or maybe 1024x768. I don't think
that's asking too much of a graphics card. Though I'm asking about it
for a card later in that time frame.
I held on to a couple of Intel Xpress machines for the EISA bus. I doubt
I'd pay the premium over a solid PCI/ISA machine.
ACK
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
