elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green) (10/15/88)
in article <5627@hoptoad.uucp>, gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) says: > wait years for real I/O cards to appear. I never was very good at > marketing, but is there a good reason for high volume computer companies > to deliberately *avoid* making machines that will plug into a wide > variety of existing cards, e.g. use a Multibus, VMEbus, STD bus, S-100 > bus, or some other well standardized, well designed, and supported bus? There's two main reasons why people use proprietary busses: 1) Expense. That's one reason the IBM PC and other early MS-DOS machines (e.g. the Victor 9000, Zenith Z-100) were not S-100 based (although the Zenith had 8-bit S-100 slots). 2) Speed. A faster computer for a lower price usually gets the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That can be combined with the Expense part above. Fast "standard" busses usually are NOT cheap. In the case of NeXT, it seems obvious that the Jobs team chose speed, and a bus with which they were familiar (remember, Apple rattled lawsuit against NeXT because most of the designers worked on the Mac II). One thing which impresses me about the posted stats is the low chip count. What that basically means is that if they get this li'l puppy into large-scale production sometime in the future, they can bring costs WAY down. For example, the prototypes for the Amiga chips filled a couple of circuit boards with TTL (using a Sage as the processor). That would have been extremely expensive. The final product, completely packaged with keyboard, disk drive, and all that TTL converted into 5 custom chips (using obsolete==cheap chip technology) can be bought for $700 at computer dealers. Unfortunately, the disk space requirements of Unix puts an effective lower end on the price... 300mb drives will not drop below $2,000 anytime soon. -- Eric Lee Green ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 It's understandable that Mike Dukakis thinks he can walk on water. He's used to walking on Boston harbor.