[rescue] [geeks] Last Call - Ultra 5/10 parts

[Andrew Jones]

On 03/10/2014 10:15 PM, Mouse wrote:
>
> Amusing.  PCI is one of the reasons I _dis_like those machines: it
> means being saddled with peecee crap for peripherals.  (Video is
> probably the worst single example, in my limited experience.)  It's as
> if Sun realized they could use inexpensive perpherals to build
> inexpensive machines, which, of course, resulted in machines that were
> not only inexpensive but cheap.
>

PCI is definitely a marker in time.  In the U5/U10, Sun consciously 
attempted to cheapen the systems with COTS PeeCee components.

Where we disagree is that I think this was more good than bad.  PCI was 
arch-independent, blisteringly fast, and cheaper to implement than SBus. 
  Most of the PCI systems and boards were quite good.

And Sun didn't give up on proprietary system buses, they just started 
attaching peripherals via a widely adopted standard.

Inexpensive, high-performance 2D graphics were a good deal, too.




(Does anyone really praise the last-generation Sun homebrew graphics, 
the MAJC stuff?)