blk@sytek.UUCP (Brian L. Kahn) (01/31/84)
People seem to be forgettin the 2 megabit port on the back of the Mac! What this provides, among other things, is an easy and generic hookup for darn near anythin, including a card cage. If there were internal slots, there would also be twice as much power supply to serve them and a fan to cool it. More cost, size, and noise. Even tho i like to add features, I'm with Apple! On the other hand, why are computer manufacturers compelled to mess up keyboards? Happens to all of them. B<
gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (02/13/84)
While a 2MBit/sec serial port sounds good, how about a 250Kbyte/sec port -- or a 128Kword/sec serial port? You're not going to put "a card cage" out there. (While main memory is only 500Kword/sec, this is for random access, not a serial bit stream. Doing random access over the serial port would slow it way down, away from "memory" speeds and into "disk" speeds.) Also, this is "burst" hardware speed, assuming full speed DMA feeding it continuously. Software overhead? What software overhead? Also, if this port is really a Z8530, then it's only spec'd to go to 1MBit/sec, at least in my data sheets.