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From: dente@s2.uucp (Colin Dente)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: FSF/AT-bus architecture
Message-ID: <5768@ux.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: 30 Mar 89 22:26:48 GMT
Sender: news@ux.cs.man.ac.uk
Reply-To: dente@s2.uucp (Colin Dente)
Organization: University of Manchester, UK
Lines: 31

In response to someone's (sorry - I don't recall who) comment about people
using the AT bus for anything other than 80x86 boards - well Apollo use it
in all their latest 'Personal workstations' (i.e. DN3000, 4000, 3500 & 4500)
and it don't seem to do them no harm.  It's not used for everything (e.g.
memory) - but then do PC maker's never put fast busses for RAM (he asks,
thereby displaying 100% lack of knowledge of IBM PCs).

I must agree with the original idea - use of this bus *would* give access
to loads of cheap peripherals - just so long as nobody suggests it should
run MSDOS - I think I'd unsubscribe immediately if that happened!!!

This does, however, lead to all sorts of wondering about operating systems
and processors - as these are fairly fundamentally inter-related - are we
aiming for a cheap unix box? - or is someone going to write a whole new
operating system? (offers?).  What would people want out of this machine?


Apologies for the deranged, meandering stream of thought, I've been here
for the last 36 hours, and the screen keeps going out of focus!

Colin


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| Colin Dente                      | JANET: ECAD@UK.AC.MAN.EE.V1              |
| Dept. of Electrical Engineering  | ARPA:  ECAD%UK.AC.MAN.EE.V1@UKACRL.BITNET|
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