Date   : Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:30:15 +0100
From   : darren.grant@... (Darren Grant)
Subject: modern BBC remake

On 18/7/07 13:06, "Pete Turnbull" <pete@...> wrote:

> 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.

I'm amazed you are still buying PC's with PCI slots in, surely not Intel
core architecture machines? PCI and AGP have long been replaced by
PCI-Express and that is fast becoming a slot for Graphics cards. Cardbus has
now been replaced by Express Card neither backwards compatible with old
cards. But the main point here is that All the interfaces mentioned are at
the end of their life regardless if you can still get them or not. The end
result will be that the next system you buy is less and less likely to have
either PCI or Cardbus making it more and more likely that you would have to
retain an old system just to use a beeb on a card.

A stand alone box that can be put on a network seems to me to have the most
potential for longevity. Seeing that it doesn't rely on a specific
connection on the client system, so the client system could be connected to
a WiFi network for example and have no Ethernet but still access a box on
the network. Due to the massive penetration of TCP-IP and Ethernet there is
likely to remain ways of connecting Ethenet equipped systems to what ever
future network technologies emerge. This also makes it completely platform
independent and using an open protocol such as VNC means that anyone who
feels like it can write their own software to access it. Maybe if the same
network processor could bridge Econet to an IP network then these boxes
could be networked to each other as well.