Michael, You missed my point about backward compatibility, which has been notoriously ABSENT from the historical events I noted.
> PCI was desperately needed by server class hardware ... Fine, let them have it. But why did ORDINARY users have to be forced into buying newer mainboards, which ONLY had PCI??!! I still use a system with 1 hard-disk, 1 CD/DVD drive, 1 diskette (remember them?) and 1 serial-port modem -- NO damned USB, Fire Wire, nor other modern GARBAGE needed or wanted! Why in HELL do I really need PCI, with my configuration?? ISA would have gone on serving me, and others, very well, but it "disappeared" after 1994. Need I tell you due to guess-WHO's desire to SELL CHIPS??!! > Thank heavens we finally got a real bus. A "REAL BUS", you say?? If so, then explain to me why, on so many Intel-based systems, there are so many PCI BRIDGES!! If it were a "real bus", there would be only ONE bus, NOT so many "bridges" to yet-another set of wires for God-Knows-What! My guess is that only adds cost and complexity, which an ordinary user like me might hope to AVOID! > PCI Express (I'm assuming you meant this, not PCI-X) is mostly > compatible with PCI at the software level. The reason for PCI > Express was the need to reduce pin count and move to what is > basically a serial interface ... So why not simply (A) omit using the pins they didn't need, and (B) specify a currently-UNUSED pin [must have been at least one of them on an AGP card!] for "what is basically a serial inter- face"? And same as above, if a few "play-games FREAKS" really NEEDED so much video speed, let THEM get new video cards. But instead, "guess who" drove AGP and all mainboards which had AGP sockets out-of-business, and we ALL need to buy new video cards and new mainboards designed for them! ABSOLUTELY NO backward- compatibility, again, though many people like me DON'T NEED any damned PCI Express or whatever it may be called! I still "get by" quite well with only my GeForce-2 AGP card, bought in 1999! And I bet there are likely many others, like me, who "Dread the Day" when they are STUCK buying a new video card, since AGP has effectively "disappeared" now! > The move to 4K sector sizes has very good technical reasons > behind it ... To which I might ALSO say an 8-letter word beginning with BULL! I have written actual "firmware", and I have friends that wrote actual HARD-disk "firmware". Along with every improvement to hard-disk speed has come ever-faster firmware processing chips, faster on-board memory, and of course better algorithms for USE of all that. So why can't such an ever-faster "industry" such as hard disks continue to process 512-byte sectors even faster, as well? Does the REST of the PC industry really need to help THEM, with all of their super sophisticated on-board hardware?? Or, in fact, could this maybe [... just MAYBE!] be another case of the Wintel Consortium software BRATS being UNABLE to achieve their targets, using only their college-professors' and bosses' much-beloved "C", and it is actually THOSE brats who are asking for such "help"?? That, in fact, is what all this begins to "sound like", to me!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
