[geeks] Anyone know of good sources of 5V DIMMs?

[Phil Stracchino]

Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> It's really too bad that IBM didn't license PS/2 architecture, or at
> least MCA, to everyone.  It took the rest of the PC world about 7 hears
> or longer to fully catch up to what MCA busses and motherboards could
> do.

Well, the problem is, *not* licensing MCA was part of the grand IBM plan
to take over the world.  It went like this:

1.  We brought out the PC architecture, and everyone copied it, and we
lost control of the market.  So then we brought out the AT architecture,
and it was better, and everyone copied THAT, and we lost control of the
market.

2.  This time, we're going to bring out a new architecture, and it's
going to be better again, but we'll keep it proprietary, and no-one will
be able to copy it without licensing it, and we'll get total control of
the market back again and everyone will buy IBM because MCA is better,
and we'll punish all those companies who cloned the PC and PC-AT.

3.  Profit!


Only problem was, the mass market looked at the licensing fees
(including the retroactive ones), and stayed away in droves; and the
average customer looked at the new MCA machines, and listened to the
technical wonks talking about how much better it was, and said, "All
that technical stuff is very fine, but what does it do for my business?"
 So MCA mostly went over like a lead balloon, because IBM didn't have
enough PC market share any more to make it a requirement, and nobody
wanted to pay the cost of the MCA chipsets.  EISA had similar issues,
plus the EISA Configuration Utilities that you had to boot from a floppy
to run every time you changed anything (and hope and pray all your card
config files were accurate and complete) were a pain in the ass, and so
EISA only really caught on in a few server niches too.

Then came Intel, the 800lb gorilla of PC hardware, with PCI, and the
rest is history.


-- 
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-886-3518
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net         Mobile: 603-216-7037
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater