9fans archive / 2000 / 05 / 70 /    prev next

From: Digby Tarvin digbyt@acm.org
Subject: [9fans] Re: PC capability (ps)
Date: Fri, 5 May 2000 15:45:58 GMT

> it no doubt depends on which workstations and PCs we've experienced.
>
Just thinking about this again, there is one sense in which I
do agree with you. Any new hardware that comes on the market
is usually made available for the Intel PC first, so from the
point of view of what you want being available, the PC has
the advantage.

I was thinking more in terms of the point of view of the
engineer that has to make the stuff, in which case I would
not rate the PC as particularly easy to add hardware to.
Or where equivalent cards exist for another platform,
I would not imagine the PC would be the easier to install
on many occasions. I am used to systems where each card needs
a block of address space whose base I need to assign,
an interrupt number which need not be unique, and one
of 256 interrupt vectors (also possibly not unique).
It is only with the PC that I end up with a draw full of
cards that can't co-exist because of conflicting interrupts,
IO ports, bios addresses, incompatible drivers etc.

The arguments seem to be much the same as those relating
to operating systems - Windows is the most likely
to be supported, but if what you want is supported on another
OS, it is likely to be more reliable. And if you have to do
it yourself, it will probably be easier on the alternative
system. The comparison does seem to break down when you compare
price, where a lot of non-Windows software is free. I guess
writing Windows software isn't much fun, so anyone that does it
expects to get paid...

Anyway, as you say, we may have had different experiences...

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk