Opinion
The Next Best Thing

 

The views expressed in this article are purely the opinions of the author, Richard Murray, and should not be taken as truth, fact, or resembling anything whatsoever. So there.

 

 

28th October 2000

 

I argued against the inclusion of ISA in the new lower-end RISC OS machine. It was counter argued that PCI was unnecessarily complex, and ISA is better than nothing.

So we get to plug in old hardware? Networking cards that can manage 10Mb/s with a tail wind?

Please!

 

There is a technology out there that is up and coming and should be possible to install into practically every RISC OS machine, and offers you modems, digital cameras, printers, scanners, and all sorts of nifty goodies.

 

USB

 

Let's face it guys, if it is possible to get streaming video down a serial connection, and with the market push to hook everybody and their uncle to the new protocol, the life of slot-in-cards isn't exactly over, but it isn't exactly thriving.
And plans are underway to make a backwards-compatible version of USB that will leave IEEE 1394 ("FireWire"™ to non-geeks) standing.

So I think that rather than PCI or ISA, we should have a GOOD implementation of USB, and a little of the remaining person-hours can be devoted towards writing some drivers...

 

 

Comments? Flames? I'll publish the best of either here.
Email me!

 

 


Return to assembler index
Copyright © 2000 Richard Murray