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Newsgroups: sci.electronics,comp.periphs
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Designing for the FHF (was Re: Proprietary hardware)
Message-ID: <1989Mar28.171856.21202@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2140@cpoint.UUCP> <3743@stiatl.UUCP> <1204@naucse.UUCP> <1410@husc6.harvard.edu> <18167@gatech.edu> <4899@cbnews.ATT.COM> <18204@gatech.edu> <13332@sequent.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 89 17:18:56 GMT

In article <13332@sequent.UUCP> roc@crg2.UUCP (Ron Christian) writes:
>But just having the populated circuit card isn't enough.  One
>needs some kind of cage for it.  How about making the card the
>same format as... steady now... the IBM AT motherboard?  No really,
>I'm serious.  There are now very inexpensive boxes available for
>an AT sized motherboard.  Why not take advantage of that?  Note that
>I'm NOT suggesting that the FHF card be designed for the X86 processor,
>or that it support any of the PC busses.  Just that the boxes
>for such a form factor are cheap and plentiful.

Disgusting though the thought is, using one of the PC buses is also
probably a good idea.  That gives you access to cheap peripherals that
you don't have to build -- and debug -- yourself.  One can make a good
argument for also providing a better bus for crucial things, like fast
disks, but nobody is going to want to redesign *all* the interesting
peripherals, and nobody is going to match the production volumes (and
hence cost savings) of (say) AT peripherals.
-- 
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