On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> wrote: > On 02/01/2012 10:15 AM, Tom Buskey wrote: >> >> >> On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 7:42 AM, Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org >> <mailto:g...@blu.org>> wrote: >> >> On 01/31/2012 07:14 PM, Ben Scott wrote: >> > On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 6:44 PM, Jon "maddog" Hall >> <mad...@li.org <mailto:mad...@li.org>> wrote: >> >>> I started looking into this more today, and quickly >> rediscovered how >> >>> much of a giant pile of kludges the IBM-PC is. >> >> The IBM PC was released in 1981. You expected something other than >> >> "kludges"? >> > Heh. Anything old will have its share of historical accidents, to >> > be sure. But there's reasonable design failings, and then there's >> > design by the infinite monkey method. As much as I live and play in >> > the IBM-PC world... much like laws and sausage, it's best not to >> look >> > too closely at the innards. >> Compare the Apple model to the IBM model. >> Apple model is closed and controlled by one company. >> The IBM-PC was open. Many manufacturers of systems, mother boards, and >> just about every thing else. So it kind of falls into the infinite >> monkey paradigm. >> >> But, as new technology comes around you will get kludges. Remember the >> 640K memory limitation. There were all sorts of kludges to expand >> memory >> on the PC. >> >> >> Actually, the IBM-PC was following the Apple ][. Jobs hadn't gotten >> into his control everything mode yet and Woz put the full schematics >> and ROM in the back of the user manual. That manual managed to teach >> new users (who to be fair, were more technical than today's average >> user) and get into the full technical detail that us geeks want. >> >> Nowadays manual are written on drool proof paper and I often wonder if >> the author & developer ever saw the software on anything but a fresh >> Windows XP sp2 install. Or worse, the daily desktop they used that >> looks nothing like a standard system. >> > They did follow the Apple ][ bus architecture. I had the handwritten Woz > stuff in the manual. I unfortunately gave the old manual the the BCS > Apple ][ group.
If I recall correctly, the Apple ][ bus gave us ROM on the I/O card to bring the driver with the hardware, but addressing was controlled by which slot you put the card in, and the signalling was closer to buffered 6502 signals, rather than buffered 8088 signals. So I don't see that as being any more of a forerunner of ISA than S-100 was. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
