> On 2019-01-08, at 11:33, Segher Boessenkool <segher@kernel.crashing.org> wrote: > >>> What I find slightly offensive is denigrating the IBM engineers of the day (by putting "engineers" in quotes for example) for devising an IMO very clever way of working around this 'shortcoming' without having to modify all the drives as you would have them do. >> >> Order ones with proper design in there. Either they specified things wrong upon ordering and had to do "brilliant" hacks once it was too late to change the order or they didn't think of the proper design in advance. Either case doesn't give them much credit. And compare what they did to what virtually every other, self-respectful engineering team did about the same time when building their machines and having to deal with the very same constraints of the time. Then you'll know why the quotes. > > The original IBM PC came with either zero (tape only) or one disk drives. > > It was never designed to be a "standard" or "first of a family", either, > as far as I see; it was just a one-off product. I recall the discussions still from the early to mid-eighties and people wondering "why on Earth" would anyone want a machine like that. Also the common conclusion (back then!) was that IBM allowed the clones because they themselves saw no value in the design that came out of this exercise. Of course it is easy today to sit back and talk from the perspective of historical facts. Like that it not only became a standard but actually created some de facto standards as a side-effect of being cheap to produce, and additionally with no prohibitive licence fees to pay for rights to produce it. But extrapolating from this to giving undeserved credit to how it was designed is what I find an unjustifiable offence to every engineering team of the same era, who put lots of good thought into their designs, while dealing with the same constraints. -- SD! - https://e4aws.silverdr.com/Received on 2019-01-08 13:00:36
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