Re: The i2o Bus: A Conspiracy Against Free Software? (fwd)

Michael Neuffer (neuffer@goofy.zdv.Uni-Mainz.de)
Sat, 19 Jul 1997 16:20:45 +0200 (CEST)


On Sat, 19 Jul 1997, Russell Coker - mailing lists account wrote:
> >like IBM did with MCA, the standard will just die. I don't think all the
> >clone providers will want to pay for using a standard. PCI only became big
> >when they opened the standard.

For a company it is not much money compared to the heaps they save
by not having to emply a bunch of engineers that do nothing then
writing and maintianing drivers for dozends of OSes. It just turns into
one driver per device.

> That's a good point. When MCA was released everyone in the industry
> agreed that the ISA bus was inadequate. EISA wasn't much better and it had
> no more compatibility than MCA (systems were produced with both ISA and MCA
> buses).

Not true. EISA was a compatible extension to the ISA bus. You could always
plug ISA cards into EISA slots.

You can still get a lot of EISA cards and also motherboards with EISA
and PCI slots.

Mike