> I didn't realize that even new PCs are short on > hardware interrupts. One more reason that someone should make a PC > designed to run *NIX.
20-25 years ago, pee-cees were a useless joke. Everybody and their pet wombat were building small machines designed to run Unix. Your choice of ns32k, m68k, micro-VAX, etc. The workstations were more expensive, Unix wasn't open source yet, busses were proprietary, software wasn't as portable as it is today. But the machines had decent engineering, they were stress tested, and they actually worked. But once the 386 came out, with its reasonable address space, the pee-cee became more and more capable, and people started switching over from workstations to the cheaper pee-cee machines. Thanks to economies of scale, workstations, and even servers (not glorified pee-cees, real servers in multiple 19" racks) started using more and more pee-cee parts. Today we have 64 bit machines that are less expensive, faster, with more memory, more disk, and FLOSS software. Userland is mostly portable although device drivers remain a problem. But most aspects of hardware have been screwed up one way or another by intel, so nothing works properly. It seems a miracle when something works at all. So yeah, they used to make machines designed to run Unix. People stopped buying them, so they stopped making them for the most part. Even Apple stopped thinking different and now uses pee-cee hardware. I guess Sun probably still makes sparcstations, anybody else? rant_level -= 10; Hmmm, I don't suppose anyone makes a ST-506 to SATA convertor? _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
