Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!ames!sun-barr!newstop!sun!concertina!fiddler From: fiddler%concertina@Sun.COM (Steve Hix) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Another type of interface card? Message-ID: <125811@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 4 Oct 89 20:58:59 GMT References: Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Distribution: na Lines: 51 In article , storkel@rudist.shell.com (S. Storkel) writes: > > 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. It does have some drawbacks... > Only > IBM would do something this stupid. Oh, I don't know. Some other companies would do the same or worse. > 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. This leaves you with either an LCD (lowest-common-denominator) slot, or be locked into a suboptimal design when you finally get to the point where you can use the nifty expansion features. > 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? The Portable has *severe* power-usage constraints...also, with a 68C000 (or whatever the alphabet soup is) onboard, a lot of the the SEx's requirements are superfluous. There may be some problems with available space onboard, too. ------------ "...I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization." - Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.