Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!franny.Berkeley.EDU!c8s-an From: c8s-an@franny.Berkeley.EDU (Alex Lau) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Another type of interface card? Message-ID: <18009@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 5 Oct 89 04:13:26 GMT References: Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: c8s-an@franny.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Alex Lau) Distribution: na Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 38 In article storkel@rudist.shell.com (S. Storkel) writes: >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? The SE/30 and Mac Portable can't have the same Processor Direct Slot type, because the SE/30 uses a 68030 chip, while the Portable uses a 16MHz 68000. The Portable could have had the same type of slot as an SE, but SE cards are really power hogs, and they're also rather huge. Neither of those qualities are good for a portable-type, battery-driven computer. NuBus is completely out of the picture for the Portable, so what else is left for the Portable to use, if the engineers want a slot? No one complains when Toshiba comes out with a different slot format for their PC-compatible portables, at least I don't think they do. The Portable is a different enough machine, and it will sell enough units that it justifies a different slot format. > -- Scott Storkel --- Alex UUCP: {att,backbones}!ucbvax!franny!c8s-an INTERNET: c8s-an%franny.berkeley.edu@ucbvax.berkeley.edu FIDONET: Alex.Lau@bmug.fidonet.org (1:161/444)