[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Shannon wrote:

> What I can't figure out is why the floppy interface is still so
> slow.  There is no reason for it.

The PC floppy interface is designed for bit-banging the hardware on the
other end.  It's slow by design so that the controller won't outpace the
mechanics of the drive.  There is nearly NO logic in a PC floppy drive.
I refer you to the Minix PC floppy driver sources. :)

> I thought there was for awhile, until a friend of mine showed me the
> SCSI floppy on his MV147 VMEbus system. It was several times faster than
> any PC floppy I've seen.

Yep.  The floppy drive is thinking for itself and can optimize its own
movements.  Hell, it probably even has some modest amount of cache to
release the bus that much faster.

> Why can't a modern PC do that?

The same reason the modern PC has 16 IRQ lines, 8 DMAs, and still starts
up in "real" mode.  Backward compatibility.

However, there were IDE floppies for a while, and they didn't suck.
But, in modern times, it seems pretty pathetic to waste an IDE port (and
slow down the other device on the chain) for 2M of removable storage.

> Same for DVD... let's have one UNRESTRICTED format, please.

But someone might try to make a duplicate copy of _The_Matrix_Reloaded_
per their fair-use rights in case the original ever gets scratched, and
then they wouldn't have to buy a new one.  SOMEONE THINK OF THE POOR
STARVING SUITS IN HOLLYWOOD AND AT THE MPAA!  *spit*

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "We're Texans.  We figure out ways to do these
Elgin, TX          (    things..."                    --Bill Bradford