Thierry Godefroy wrote: >I don't deal with the present situation (there are still a few ISA cards >available), but with the _future_ one: if there is no PCI-based successor >to the Q60, then what the hell a future (say in five years) Q60 buyer will >be able to use with it ? No ISA card = no floppy, no harddisk, no serial >port, no parallele port, no network, no nothing but graphic, sound and >keyboard !
No ISA cards in the shops doesn't mean no Q40/Q60 cards available for us! The QL hardware "market" really does not require lots of extension cards. We can order a batch to ensure future supply, if availability problems might appear. And if there were unexpectedly so many Q60 orders that we need lots of extension cards, there would be enough reason to design the cards ourselves, or integrate the peripherals onto the board!!! :-) If you consider ISA a future Q60 availability problem, it's part is 0.1% of the whole. The other 99.9% of the problem are lack of QL software and QL users. And *no* Q40/Q60 is sold without card. At least the IO card is always part of the Q60, so nobody needs to worry about having a Q60 without these basic peripherals, anyway. >I just say that we _could_ support _some_ (OK, let's say "just a very few") >basic PCI cards (I/O, Ethernet, Sound, perhaps even simple graphic cards). Extremely unlikely. Look at it this way: The Q40 software development started 4 years ago. In this time we have not even managed to make full SMSQ/QDOS use of one single (and relatively simple) ISA card. Better not calculate how long the (complicated) PCI BIOS *and* PCI card will take. BTW the Milan folks also thought they were clever, going for PCI. The Milan started at the same time as the Q40. And now? The *ISA* cards for the Q40 are still available. New and in full production! The *PCI* cards for the Milan are no longer produced. So much for using PCI. All the best Peter
