[rescue] I'm one happy geek

[Joshua D. Boyd]

I personally think that USB is rather nice.  I wonder if it would be
possible to get working via a USB PC Card, and a sbus PC card thing.
Those sorts of USB cards probably wouldn't be supported by solaris though.

Anyway, the things I like about USB are that it is hot-plugable, and
virtually limitless expandability.  I never have enough serial ports.  If
I had my way, the machine I'm at now would have a minimum of 6 serial
ports (one for mouse, one for wacom tablet, one for Palm, one for camera,
one for serial consoles of other machines, and one for my serial printer).

Everything I have on serial is fairly easy to get on USB though (worst
case, use USB to serial adapters), and while getting more than 2 serial
ports is a pain, hooking 6+ usb devices isn't.  The only problem is that
most serial->usb adapters are unsupported by real OSs.

As to DSSI/MFM/ESDI, I've never heard of the first, and I find that later
two to big rather intimidating (and I'm told they are inferior to SCSI).
I'm IDE/SCSI (IDE dominates as to the most megabytes, but I have more SCSI
drives).  I'd love to dump IDE, but I'm told that DVD roms actually are
superior on IDE over SCSI. Something about SCSI not dealing well with
varying block sizes was the reasoning I was given.

My problem is that I want more disk capacity and CPU power than I can
afford by sticking to the superior solutions.  However, this comes back to
bite me in time wasted trying to keep things working (I'm currently
resorting to a source build of XFree 4.1.0 to try and fix some silly
problems with 3D acceleration).

A SS20 might have better bus bandwidth than a modern PeeCee, but the
modern PeeCee still renders video frames faster, and transforms matrixes
faster.

--
Joshua Boyd

On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, Brian Hechinger wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 09:19:38PM -0400, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> > 
> > Brand new USB scanners are pretty cheap (>$100).  If that is too expensive
> 
> i've got no USB here.  let me look around real quick.  what's newer? a sparc20
> or a DEC 3000 alpha box?  whichever is newer is the newest box i have. :)
> 
> i predate USB by SEVERAL years.  the newest machine in this room (newest meaning
> most recent in this case) is a PDP-11/23+ so you can see how i feel about USB,
> i don't even have IDE capability.  i'm an all SCSI/DSSI/MFM/ESDI shop here. ;)