[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[Mike Meredith]

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:52:15 -0500 (CDT), Lionel Peterson wrote:
> 
> Didn't Sun acquire some technology from Cray, around the time they
> started selling "mainframe class" systems?

Yes. They acquired the division that built the CS6400 and starting on
what would become the E10000. At least it *looks* from the outside that
Sun acquired technology with that buyout. The inside story may be
slightly different ... the CS6400 was very Sun-like using some of the
design from the SPARCcenter 2000, and there's a hint that Cray and Sun
were working closely together.

> I don't think MS "choose" IDE, but they did support it, and enabled
> Mfg. to use this lower-cost technology... The last PC that MS
> specified like that was the ill-timed MSX[0] machine, which was
> popular in Asia, but not in the US...

I'm not sure how much Microsoft was involved in the MSX specification.
It looks more like a Japanese initiative that they allowed Microsoft to
get very close to. Some confusion may be due to the fact that the head
of the MSX-consortium was an ex-Microsoft executive.

> >I can get you're point, but at the same time SCS is harder to  
> >configure, it has gremlins that give even seasoned SCSI veterans
> >like myself a headache. If you think educating people in how to set
> >1 Master/Slave jumper is hard, try explaining setting up SCSI buses
> >and using Binary ID codes to them. That's ASKING for them to glaze
> >over :o).

SCA solves pretty much all of those problems.

> IDE termination/cabling is much easier than SCSI - no one ever had to 
> sacrifice a chicken to the gods[1] of IDE ;^)

No? I guess if you mess with SCSI too much you'll smear any disk cable
with chicken blood (or goat's blood if you're feeling paranoid) just in
case :)

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  The trouble with a sigmonster is that it takes at least 10 attempts to
  start writing a reply.
  --me