Never ceases to amaze

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Robert Kennedy wrote:
> While not hot plugable, the Amiga OS & hardware first
> used the term plug & play about 1987 and meant it.
> When the system powered up it inquired 'Who, What,
> Where & What do you need?' to anything attached to the
> Zorro bus. Then it sorted things out, assigned
> resources and finished booting. Got ram on three
> cards, plus the motherboard? No problem Autoconfig(r)
> pools it and assigns it where needed. Done with a
> resource? Intuition(r) puts it out for reuse. Two
> programs need to use the widget.library? (think .dll)
> Sure, throw it into memory and every program can use
> the same one copy. We don't need no stinking extra
> .dll copies!
> 
> Hell, I never even heard of an interrupt until I
> started fitting junk PC's together. DMA? Don't they
> give out some kinda awards?
> 
> If this were a technocracy we'd all be using third or
> fourth generation Betacams & Bill Gates would be
> trying to market Word 3.1.

I *LOVED* the Amiga's Zorro bus, and even designed several add-on cards 
for it (which auto-config'd, of course!).  The cool thing about the 
Amiga design is the "smarts" (including the 'ROM' which contained the 
cards requirements/functions) could be implemented in a cheap PAL (ie 
about 50-100 "real" logic gates).  A PCI interface takes tens of 
thousands of gates to do the same thing (typically 10-30K gates).

Oh, and the Amiga could auto-config all attached hardware, and boot into 
the graphical user interface faster than a modern HDD spins up.  I 
really miss that feature on my current PC's, which have 2-3 orders of 
magnitude more "speed", but still take MINUTES to boot into a GUI...<sigh>

And to top it all off, the damn CheckFree folks shut down their dial-up 
network April 2, which means I have to ditch my perfectly working dos 
based checkbook program (managing your money), and upgrade to Quicken or 
M$ Money (since GnuCash won't do online bill-pay).  I guess "progress" 
marches on, whatever the cost...

Hmm...kind of sounds like I'm turning into an old fogie.  I guess 35 is 
getting pretty ancient in the computer world...

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net