Date   : Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:06:06 +0100
From   : pete@... (Pete Turnbull)
Subject: modern BBC remake

On 18/07/2007 11:28, Darren Grant wrote:
> Jules, you are still living in the last millennium ;)
> 
> PC's don't come with PCI any more and Laptops don't come with CardBus any
> more.

Eh?  We buy hundreds of PCs, and all the recent ones, across a range of 
specs, have at least one and usually two or more PCI slots.  All the 
laptops also have at least one slot.

> The only interface you can be certain to find on a modern PC or Mac is USB
> 2.0.

Universal Serial Bus is the worst misnomer I've seen in the computer 
industry in a long time.  It isn't a bus, for a start.  As for 
"Universal", I think not.  I completely agree with Jules about its 
awfulness.  It exists on PCs and Macs and practically never in useful 
form on anything else.  The whole world's not a PC[1].  To mention some 
common examples, very few USB serial adaptors that work on a PC will 
work on a Mac; we've found several USB memory sticks that work on a PC 
but not on a Mac, and you don't get much simpler than those two 
interfaces.  Bluetooth sticks?  Forget it.  The problem is that there's 
no standard way of addressing the devices beyond the bus, at least not 
ones that get adhered to.  None of those devices stand a cat's chance of 
working on a Sun (we have rather a lot of Suns here) far less any SGI 
(we do those too) but both those families do have well-behaved PCI 
busses, and the vendors in question do provide the tools to write 
drivers for PCI.

On the other hand, an Ethernet interface isn't such a bad idea, once you 
sort out how you're going to talk to it.

[1] cf "The whole world's a VAX", if you're old enough.

-- 

Pete                                           Peter Turnbull
                                               Network Manager
                                               University of York