[rescue] I'm one happy geek

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> 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.

PCI, but still:

hydra:/home/users/james% man ohci
Reformatting page.  Please Wait... done

Devices                                                  ohci(7D)

NAME
     ohci - OpenHCI host controller driver

SYNOPSIS
     usb at unit-address

DESCRIPTION
     The ohci driver  is  a USBA (Solaris  USB Architecture)
      compliant nexus driver that supports the OpenHCI Host  Con-
     troller Interface  Specification  1.0a, an industry standard
     developed
      by  Compaq,  Microsoft,  and  National Semiconductor.

     The ohci driver  supports bulk, interrupt,  and
      control transfers.   ohci   supports  the nexus device con-
     trol interface.

[...]

SEE ALSO
     hid(7D),hubd(7D)uhci(7D),scsa2usb(7D),usb_mid(7D)

I've had a USB card (first in my AXi, currently in my U30) for over a year
and a half.  It's a garden variety OHCI card purchased for $19.95 at
Fry's.

Works great with zip disks, printers, and quite a variety of interesting
input devices.  I'm currently playing with gutting really cheap PC USB
joysticks for data acquisition.

Heck, even OpenVMS has had USB support for some time.

> 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.

Baloney.  SCSI DVD drives do tend to be more expensive, though.

> A SS20 might have better bus bandwidth than a modern PeeCee, but the

It doesn't, not by any stretch of the imagination.  The SS20 bus design
was reasonable at the time but quickly fell flat.  Xbus didn't but was
relegated to the high end.

-James