Re: Macs & PCs -- **WAY** O.T.

["Richard N. Moyer" <dickmoyer@earthlink.net>]

Anything that was developed by the Industry Group IEEE is an "open" system,
meaning that the IEEE has a set (long list) of requirements that MUST be
met to be compliant with the IEEE standard. SCSI is an example, however
there are now many versions of SCSI as it has progressed through time. One
of the requirements of any newer SCSI standard is that it be backward
compatible with earlier versions; e.g. Ultra SCSI< SCSIII<SCSI, etc. The
problem has been, with almost all of the IEEE standards that vendors either
jump the gun before the IEEE standard is completed (by a committee of
industry professionals who's companies are active in the standard under
consideration), or vendors "short" the standard by omitting items listed
within the standard (reads like a 2-5 indented specification list, and is
very metric). There were considerable problems among Scanner vendors
selling to PC users by including a "shorted" SCSI card with their scanners,
which either didn't fit the ISA slot, or simply didn't work or was
recognized by Windows 3x or Windows 95. When confronted these vendors
simply said - "sorry, try a Adaptec board instead". Same problem with
Iomega, only they said get rid of your Adaptec board and use ours. The
"competitive" rush to beat the other guy to the marketplace produced a lot
of consumer agony. The MIME standard was another area where software
vendors shorted consumers, the worst offender in my opinion was Microsoft
with their mail systems released with Windows 95.

Apple has embraced the PCI bus since the PowerPC models came out about
1993-4; before that the "nubus"(sp) which was slower, and not used in PCs.
Intel developed the PCI standard, I believe. It is not proprietary. Apple
is moving to 64 bit PCI slots (and 128 bit), and has already done so for
the ATI Rage graphic boards, which occupy the one 64bit PCI (fast, high
bandwidth) slot on G3 models, and iMacs. The movement to faster buses is
already going on, with IEEE1394 (Firewire) (which has now replace SCSI on
the Motherboard) to increase bandwidth on connected peripherals.

Apple moved to USB bus (developed by Intel) when the iMac came out. The USB
system is where the PC crowd missed out, as well as with IEEE1394. Apple's
move on USB started the movement among vendors, and now has spread to the
PC side, but slowly. Only now are new PCs abandoning Parallel ports; L1, L2
serial ports and moving to USB. Apple did move to the IDE drives to bring
down component costs, but many graphics people, including myself stick with
SCSI drives because of flexibility, chaining together, RAID, and the fact
that it is very easy with Apple to have a self contained operating system
on any SCSI drive anywhere - and all applications will work under any
operating system, any drive, no matter when, where, or how the application
was originally installed, making portability of data and applications a
cinch without new host installation. If an application has never been run
under a host operating system, the application automatically installs
whatever system files (preferences) are required, and you are up and
running. It is much more difficult to have multiple operatin systems with
IDE drives and their master/slave dictates. And with Windows you have to
rig the BIOS, if even then.

>At 09:24 AM 6/18/99 -0400, you wrote:
>>Microsoft Windows is a closed system. So is Apple OS. An open system
>>invites confusion, lack of standards compliance (and weak standards), cut
>>throat competitive marketing tactics, and in the end disservice to the
>>public that the "openness" was supposed to serve better.
>
>
>Is "SCSI" an open system?  I think so, and it has served
>its users (not to mention manufacturers) quite well.
>I was thinking more of hardware than software when I made
>my comment about "open" systems.
>
>Ditto for the ISA bus, PCI bus -- not to mention the
>industrial buses (Multibus, VME, etc.)  Not to mention
>IEEE-802.3, otherwise known as Ethernet, or a slew of
>other standards and conventions that have driven the
>electronics industry over the last couple of decades.
>
>As to serving the consumer, consider the incredibly
>lows costs of PC hardware these days...  eg., a V.90
>modem for $19.00... or a whole PC, for $500 (350 Mhz
>CPU, 4G hard drive, 32 M memory.)  Not too shabby, IMHO.
>
>That's the part that Apple missed out on.  I understand
>the newer Apple models embrace PCI bus (how many slots?)
>and USB.  That's good news.
>
>
>rafe b.
>
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Dick Moyer
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