leein@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu (06/25/88)
A friend of mine asked me to post the following message to the net.
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Dear PC clone makers;
I have some thought to share with you. Why do you not say no to IBM's
proprietary Micro Channel Bus Architecture? The possible answer I can
expect from such companies as Ta??? and De?? is that they do not have
the technology to develop their own version of OS/2 for an advanced
32-bit bus they might choose instead of MCA. I think this is the
primary reason the other PC clone makers are still stuck to AT
bus which is out of dated for the present 386 age. I think this
is what everyone outside the clone business does not understand
about why they are still stuck to the slow AT bus or just follow IBM's
way blindly.
Another important reason I come up with is that they are not
adventurous any more as they were when they started their business.
(Co???? and De??). Engineers might have had such an idea. However it can't
go through the manager level as it did not in XEROX PARC about
9 years ago.
So listen to me and gather as OSF members did, and choose a
new advanced bus like NuBus (which is in the public domain) or
Multibus II (which is supposedly better (? well...) for the Intel chips) and
make your own version of OS/2 to this new advanced bus standard.
This time just make such revised version of OS/2 compatible
to MS's or IBM's OS/2 as much as possible. Please don't try to
make it incompatible as OSF is now doing for UNIX. Then customers
won't buy your machines with such OS.
To accomplish this job there must be some initiatives. Possible
candiadate companies are HP, UNYSYS, and AT&T which sell PC clones. I think
only these companies have engineers who can do both hardware and
software projects. Who is going to decide on such a project? Sadly,
the managereal personels do. So show this message to them and let them
act.
One caution about the project. Just remember what happened to
ADA and PL/1 (and OSF's UNIX next time), which are the outcomes
of committee, and compare them with C, PASCAL, and Modula-2 which are
the works of one or two veteran designers. Managers usually don't
understand how things are going.
Thanks.
H. SONG
song@uispg.csl.uiuc.eduroot@cca.ucsf.edu (Computer Center) (06/30/88)
In article <3400001@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu>, leein@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu writes: > > I have some thought to share with you. Why do you not say no to IBM's > proprietary Micro Channel Bus Architecture? The possible answer I can > expect from such companies as Ta??? and De?? is that they do not have > the technology to develop their own version of OS/2 for an advanced > 32-bit bus they might choose instead of MCA. > ... > So listen to me and gather as OSF members did, and choose a > new advanced bus like NuBus (which is in the public domain) or ... > > H. SONG > song@uispg.csl.uiuc.edu The IEEE bus standards groups have done a lot of high level design work on non-proprietary buses. However, buyers are not interested in any single supplier buses unless the supplier is _huge_. Multiple supplier buses would be a different story. We are already seeing many dual-bus systems in the 386 machines, one bus is AT compatible for peripherals and the other is a non-standard 32-bit bus for the memory. How about getting together over an existing standard (Futurebus?) for this 32-bit access to allow not only memory but high performance (can you say animated graphics?) peripherals to be used and continue the AT bus at least for a transitional period. Actually, the AT bus is not all that bad for a lot of stuff or we wouldn't see machines based on it with present performance levels. I am not personally knowledgeable about the NuBus but I have gathered that NuBus peripherals may (must?) be processor specific, e.g. ROMs with executable code. This immediately implies fragmentation and confusion of the market. Am I correctly informed? Thos Sumner (thos@cca.ucsf.edu) BITNET: thos@ucsfcca (The I.G.) (...ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cca.ucsf!thos) OS|2 -- an Operating System for puppets. #include <disclaimer.std>