Date   : Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:47:52 +0200
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: Risc PC (Was 'Minitel in France')

On 24/07/2011 20:18, Mike Pepper wrote:

> All the direct driven hardware broke from Windows 2000 onwards.

Well, to be fair, it was idiotic of Win95 to allow hardware to be 
hijacked by user programs. Hell, my PtrIIC (IIC via printer port) DLL 
works by directly bashing the parallel port addresses. [*] Thankfully 
there was a tweak (giveio) that allowed it to keep working under XP. ;-)



> had gone; leaving, in one case, a ?50,000 colorimeter, with the only other
> option of buying a new software suite at a price of around half the cost of
> a new machine).

Given it's some specialist kit, why could it not remain on the hardware 
that worked? Was the upgrade an upgrade for the sake of upgrading? One 
of the (old!) machines at work is an automated crate (I swear it is 
steam powered). It is running Windows for Workgroups on an underpowered 
486 board with custom ISA modules plugged in. Nobody plans to update it, 
because *it* *works*.


> slow response problems with the mainframe, and it turned out that the
> original software was running on a emulation of the orginal hardware and OS,
> because no-one wanted to risk the debugging that would come with
> re-compiling the COBOL for the newer 'frame.

You know, I'd have thought writing and debugging an emulator would have 
been a bigger challenge!


> I got it done, and seriously upset the mainframe supplier,

I'll bet.
   face += egg;


> (and that would have stacked 2 emulators, as I recall!)..

Fires up RedSquirrel.
Fires up 65Host.
Loads Chuckie.

Hmmm, not as bad as I thought. ;-)


> a lot of companies used the 'spare' 8 bits to store things in,

Come, now Acorn wouldn't do anything silly like that!
   <looks@... SWIs>
Oh.


> or hardware makers that don't stick to the rules.

I've already mentioned (here?) my Compaq that wouldn't allow a PCI video 
capture card to stream to a NAS via a PCI ethernet card, as I could have 
one or the other generating interrupts, but *not* *both*.
Meh.


> SATA 2 was supposed to be transparently backward compatable with SATA 1.

Why pick on SATA? We can go right back to the early IDE drives and how 
the Master/Slave concept nearly fell apart as some drives point-blank 
refused to talk to some other drives, and how some didn't want to be 
slaves off anything...


> Sometimes the gutsy thing to do would have been to scrap the old standard,

Heh, if this was implemented, we might look to a future with something 
nicer than x86 tech. However I can't see Microsoft dropping a big money 
maker. I don't think they are interested in Win8 on ARM to look to 
defect, I think they realise they need a viable presence on ARM these days.


Best wishes,

Rick.

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...