On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Douglas Goodall
<douglas...@mac.com> wrote:
I hated that whole deal. It meant if you didn't have the floppy that went with a
particular system or board, you were out of luck, and since the configuration
floppies were copyright IBM, I don't remember ever having a central location
to get replacement configuration floppies other than to order them from IBM,
if they even still had the floppies are orderable part numbers after a few years.
Douglas
On Jun 13, 2011, at 11:41 AM, Bill Lewis wrote:
> Remember the IBM PS/2 reference disk (or whatever they called it)
> "solution" to the jumpers and dip switches.
>
> Bill
>
>
> On 6/13/2011 2:39 PM, Douglas Goodall wrote:
>> In the PC world, it became a pathological issue that lead to the "Plug
>> and Pray" initiative, which failed because
>> of the need to register your devices with a central authority and there
>> was BIOS level database issues.
>>
>> The final solution for PCs was the PCI spec which allowed the BIOS and
>> hardware to sort out the port, interrupt
>> and DMA requirements.
>>
>> S100 being part of the First Cause of micro-computing still requires
>> manual integration and anything we can
>> do to streamline (and make understandable) that process is helpful.
>>
>> Boards with fixed (unconfigurable) I/O, interrupt, or DMA requirements
>> become fixtures around which other
>> boards must be configured, and in the case of an unresolvable conflict,
>> hard decisions must be made about
>> board combinations that cannot be used.
>>
>> Douglas