On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 09:44 -0400, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> PCI was a significant improvement over ISA.  Even if you understood what I/O
> address and IRQ settings were, it was still a hassle to make sure none of
> your devices collided.  And then it wasn't about the .01% of the people that
> understood what hardware configuration was anyway.  PCI and USB are about
> making things easier for the 99.99% of computer users who don't understand
> the magic behind things.  It's also about reducing support costs and making
> computers accessible to ever increasing numbers of morons, who ultimately
> drive the prices down and indirectly pay a lot of our salaries.
> 
> Even though I do understand much of the magic behind the curtain, I like PCI
> and USB as apposed to ISA and RS-232.  Understanding how it works still
> doesn't tell me which I/O address to assign or whether I need a half twist
> or straight cable between this device and that, or having to dig out or make
> the right adapter cable because one device used a male DB-9 and the other a
> female DB-15.  Good riddance.

Right on Olin, I think people have truly forgotten how HORRIBLE using PC
peripherals were in those days.

On the ISA side, here you had a bus that wasn't even synchronous, you
had to adjust wait states based on what speed the CPU ran at and what
the slowest device on the bus was. Plug the wrong card into one of the
slots and the system wouldn't boot anymore due to resource conflicts.
Run the CPU too fast and some cards would stop working.

Some cards had jumpers, some had switches, and some were programmed with
an exe; those were the worst since you always lost the floppy with the
exe, and even if you had it, often you'd have to take some other card
out just so you could program that card. In any case, the config options
were always very limited, trying to juggle all the resources was
sometimes impossible. Often certain resource adjustments wouldn't even
work (using upper IRQs often wasn't supported by much software).

PnP did eventually get added to ISA, it NEVER worked well.

As for USB, despite it's horrible initial state (mostly related to OS
issues, win95c was officially the first windows OS with USB, it NEVER
worked well, win98 kinda worked, win98se was much better), but there
were hardware issues as well. That said, USB has made things so easy
it's almost laughable. On OSs other then windows USB is a real pleasure,
you just plug pretty much anything (supported) in and it just works, no
drivers to install, it just works. Windows still is living in the
backwards world where many devices beyond the most basic still require
drivers from the manu, yuck.

Just my 2 cents.

TTYL

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