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PCI phased out? (Announce)

posted by RayeR Homepage, CZ, 10.02.2011, 17:57
(edited by RayeR on 10.02.2011, 18:14)

> Well, ISA is gone a long time too, and people complained as hard when the
> DIN keyboard was exchanged for the PS/2. Or ISA by PCI.
Yes. E.g. can you imagine there are special ISA/PCI adapters for industrial and medical devices, that cost more than whole PC? When mobo fail and you have to buy new one you are missing the interface. You have to pay x-times more for overpriced special industrial mobo (btw it's nothing special, one my friend do with advantech mobo, they cost ~5x than office desktop mobo but some of them fails after 2-3 years like those cheap desktop mobos - same china crap)...
But it's not my case. I just have some favorite HW that I like to use.

> Actually several modern boards have COM pinheaders on the mobo. They are
> just not connected. The flat-cable with (9 or 25 pins) serial port can be
> found easily and cheaply (but unfortunately if you order only one, the
> shipping costs will be magnitudes larger than the price. We need at least
> one COM per system, so we bought a bunch of them at low cost)
Hm, I was looking on various core iX mobos and didn't saw such pin headers. Only for USB. I belive that superIO chip may still contain neened pins but they are lazy to route pins out. Can you show me such mobo (not industrial)?
I know about one Gigabyte that has even DSUB9&25 for COM&LPT on backside.

> I do miss PS/2 kbd and mouse though. While USB2 kbd/mouse works far better
> on somewhat recent systems than when it on older systems(*) , the plug and
> play nature can cause funky behaviour if other devices are plugged in on
> the bus.
USB KB/mouse support (and USB flashdisk) is done via BIOS emulation and there are some programs that crashes with it. E.g. Uniflash in some cases. So if it would be 100% transparent emulation I don't complain.

> To be honest, I never really liked USB, and avoid it if I reasonably can
> (e.g. I buy ESATA HDs, and firewire in the past). Basically I only use it
> for printer and sticks.
I also don't like it. BTW did you e.g. tried to connect 4 or more serial/usb convertor to USB hub and collect simultaneously sent data streams? Many USB hubs will fail and drop some data. You need to figure out which ports will work together and maybe you end up with less than 4 working.
I also do alot with MCU and have a lot of gadgets to COM/LPT ports because this is simle interface that you can implement on MCU side and also control SW on PC consist of a few outportb() instead of handling USB evil...
Also ISA was good for this case. I can made simple ISA card at home with common parts from 74xx logic but I probably cannot do it for PCI (but still possible) and surely not for PCI-E.

> Won't miss floppy too. Used one only two times in the last 6-7 years, both
> times for bios recovery, but this increasingly works with USB thumbdrives
> too
I still use floppy. Sometimes for booting various OS that I want to try and also for transfering data from older spectrum analyser (it costed ~4x than office PC so I don't accept idea trash it and buy new one). Fortunatelly there are also USB floppies...

> I actually can't wait for that to happen. Kills the MBR and finally no
> primary partition limit (and/or other special partition handling) anymore.
> But that is from a *nix perspective.
I didn't reach 2TB prolem so don't care yet. BUT it's not about MBR, it's about BIOS services. If there will not be BIOS you cannot boot DOS. Modern OS like MACOS can use EFI for loading but who will rewrite DOS? This is what I call end of IBM PC compatible. Well it is still x86 but completly without legacy support stuff.

BTW any idea why VESA LFB access is so slow on that PC?

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

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