On 13/05/2019 20:51, Ethan Dicks wrote: > The benefits of the PS/2 was on the IBM side, to attempt to recapture > the desktop from the Taiwanese clone makers. I disagree. VGA was a benefit to everyone, so was the 16550 UART and 1.44mb 3.5" floppy. The mouse and keyboard port is arguable, but to me the smaller connector and the simplified mouse hardware support was a benefit (you didn't have to waste your only serial port or an ISA slot just for the mouse). All of those things were incorporated by the PC clones, so they must have considered them a benefit too. The MCA based machines we used were made by NCR and the SCSI controller, multiport serial port controllers and network cards were touted as being second to none. We used PC clones for machines that didn't need that complexity of hardware. I own a ford, but I don't claim that Lambourghini are terrible for making cars that are more expensive. > But that was the entire point of the MCA bus - a proprietary bus (that > did happen to include some technical fixes to real limitations of the > ISA bus) to promote corporate sales of genuine IBM machines. The last > thing IBM wanted was a bus anyone could make cards for. Sure IBM wanted their share of the money, isn't that what everyone invents new products? The industry instead went with E-ISA. Which is a standard war just like Beta max vs VHS or HD-DVD vs Bluray. > but really, the coming of Windows 3.x created the demand > for _some_ graphic bus, and outside of IBM, that followed the VLB->PCI > progression. At least some of the PS/2 had on board video, they weren't particularly looking at graphics busses. IBM PC was 1981, XT was 1983, AT was 1984, PS/2 was 1987, EISA was 1988. That was how quickly technology was changing, I'm not convinced there was a huge demand in 1992 for VLB & PCI. Intel chipsets started supporting it, other manufacturers followed and then most customers got used to them. There wasn't really a PC games industry that was pushing for ever faster hardware at the time. There wasn't really any OS support for PCI until Windows 95. IBM miscalculated their importance as technical leaders of the market, but only because up until that point everyone had followed them. It was only when IBM asked the clone manufacturers to help foot the bill of the R&D if they were going to steal their lunch that it broke down. Apple also tried to get people to pay to play manufacturing Mac clones and decided to stick with a monopoly when that didn't work.Received on 2020-05-29 21:18:10
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