Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!orion.cf.uci.edu!elroy!cit-vax!woolstar
From: woolstar@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (John D Woolverton)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs
Subject: Designing for the FHF
Keywords: schematics, repair information, free software foundation,
Message-ID: <10078@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 18 Mar 89 02:24:49 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 49

| Yeah, I'd like to suggest that you design for something better than what
| current technology can do now.  Over the last several years, processor speeds
| have increased something like a factor of 5.

And new processors have come out, some doing well, some fading into
the woodwork.  (How many people have heard of a machine based on the
National Semiconductor, or the Clipper Chip set.  I have, but only
because I looked for them.)

| So "we" need to design for an (at least potentially) incredibly fast
| bus, and include a large (256K?) cache (the larger the cache, the slower
| "main" memory can be), option for hardware floating point, and a "real"
| intelligent ports card, and some flavor of Ethernet(TM), and a fast multi-
| drive disk controller (SCSI-2 may be a real good standard, speed- and
| compatibility-wise), hardware implementation of X-Windows, and (what else do
| *you* want to see?) ....

Make it independant.  SCSI and ethernet, make it disk independant;  but
go a few steps farther.  Make it CPU independant.  Make it memory
independant.  Make it display and IO independant.  Anybody remember S100?
What we need, is a modern day S100, where you can take any CPU/MMU/FPU
mother board, stick in any memory board, io board, display board,
disk controller, and it all worked.  You could even design any part you
wanted, and it would interface properly.

| But the main point is to look ahead of what current technology *can* do.

That means in all parts of hardware, people are going to build more,
faster, smaller, and the trick is to mix the old stuff and new stuff
together.  Like how would you use a card designed for a 10Mhz NuBus
with a new 25Mhz NuBus.  Heck, people might be satisfied to keep
disk drives and displays around for years, meaning that they would
be running 100-1000 times slower than the CPU's if technology
keeps up.  How do you keep all these parts talking to each other.

What people want now is pretty clear, a design for a public domain
computer system in comp.sys.ns32k went along for a while, until more
ideas kept coming up, with no one willing to do the work.  But what
new stuff will come out in the future?  New storage devices?  New
network devices and protocals?  New input devices?  

More importantly, if you're going to make a public domain computer
system.  Make one that companies can develop for.  One that makes
sence.  A big idea in the .ns32k group was to build an IBM bus
onto the computer so that available screen and disk controller
cards would be usable.  (Not that IBM bus makes sense, its just
that stuff was available for it and CHEAP!)

Make it free, and then make it FREE!