Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bcm!shell!storkel From: storkel@rudist.shell.com (S. Storkel) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Another type of interface card? Message-ID: Date: 4 Oct 89 19:44:38 GMT Sender: usenet@shell.com Distribution: na Organization: Shell Development Company, Bellaire Research Center, Houston, TX Lines: 32 I was just looking at some of the product brochures for the new Macintosh Portable. Everything sounded great until I read the following paragraph: Processor Direct Slot (PDS) * The PDS is a high-performance slot connected to the microprocessor bus that will support one expansion card. (Note: The PDS is not compatible with the SE, SE/30, or NuBus expansion slots.) Maybe I'm being short-sighted here, but it seems incredibly stupid for Apple to have four totally incompatible interface slots. Only IBM would do something this stupid. It would seem to me that the smart thing to do would be to make ONE type of interface slot that would be the same across the entire Macintosh family. What happened? Did the interface guys get bored with three totally incompatible interfaces and decide to design a fourth just so the engineers at other companies would have something new to do? Why couldn't someone have designed things so that there were at most three types of interfaces (best bet: SE/30 and Mac Portable sharing the same type of interface). Sure it would have been a little bit more complicated, but I think the payoffs would have been well worth the effort. Where am I missing the boat? -- Scott Storkel Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above do not represent those of Shell Development Company, BLUware, Rice University, Apple Computer, or any other organization.