Mail Archives: opendos/2001/02/15/11:58:37
Oh yes I remeber those dats. You can even add floppy, MFM, and RLL
drives to that list. They had cable with twists in them and some that
dod not, so you had to figure out what you had and which drive would be
which when you connected a second drive to the system and figure out
which drive had to have the terminating resister pack installed. The
fubby part of it is that both floppy and HD had 34 pin cables and you
could accidently get them mixed up and neither your floppies or your HDs
would work. The twist in the cables were just slightly different!
Thre was this one idiot where I worked that just did not seem to want to
read and follow the directions. So he installed the second drive and did
not bother to change the the resister pack from the orginal drive to the
new drive. Bith drives were the same capacity. So the idiot low level
formatted the second drive (or so he thought) and managed to low level
format both drives simualtaneously and lost all of his data and programs
on the original drive. I jus laughed at him and told him they put those
instructions in there for a reason. My self I would have completely
disconnected the comtrol and data cables from the original drive and
istalled the new drive as the only drive and low level and high level
formatted that drive, then reinstall the origibal drice as the first
drive and the new one as the second drive.
There are horror stiories like this concerning the eatly SCSI drives
too. SCSI-I as we now call it, was a lot like IDE is, everyone had their
own standards and did not follow the real SCSI standards. Then either
the IEE and/or IEEE steped in and laid down the SCSI rules and got that
mess straightened out.
I don't know if they will ever get the IDE mess straightened out. You
have all these different stnadards within the IDE standard, instead of a
single standard that would apply to ALL IDE devices and force all
manufactures to follow the strict standards instead of coming up with
their own concocted vatiations of the standards.
There were also some concoctions they came up with in the early days of
IDE to use two drives on a single controller. Some just made a mirror
image of the first drive and others would use both drives as one and
they were formatted accordingly. That was just another big mess and no
standards were set for doing that stuff.
This crap does not just apply to IDE or early SCSI, or MFM, or even
drives. There were several standards for ethernet cards, printer
interfaces and look what IBM did to the serial interface standard when
they came out with the so-called AT serial standard where they reduced
the 25 pin serial srandard down to 9 pins. You could probably write
several books about these so-called standards on just the IBM PC alone.
You may even remember the crap for standards with IBM PC video. Finally
several manufactures got together and created VESA. VESA set the video
standards and IBM screamed their heads off because VESA was not going to
include some of the new IBM video standards. VESA told IBM to shove it
because IBM would not realease their new standards as they wanted them
secret so they could monopolize that end of the market. As it turned out
they did either by accident or at the last minute IBM gave in and
included the 8514 standard. I do not think the IBM's XGA stardard got
included, but remember something about it working with VESA cards and
was probably eventually included into the VESA standard. We had the same
crap with Vesa Local Bus. Some idiot manufactures decided that people
would only use their card, so they did not bother to put any buffering
on their cards and would load down the bus too much if you installed a
second VLB card. Originally it was just called Local Bus and VESA
stepped in and made some standards to reduce the maximum loading so that
up to three VESA cards could be put into a system without excessive
loading of the Local Bus.
Like I say, you can write books about these so-called standards.
Fortumately, PCI is not too bad, because Intel laid down the rules for
that and developed entirely on their own and inplemented it before a
bunch of idiot enfineers from various maufactures messed that up for us.
Look at the mess that was created with memory managers to use extended
and EMS and EEMS memory. We DOS users are still living with that mess.
VCPI, DPMI, EMS, EEMS, XMS, LIM 3.2, LIM 4.0, etc.
Look at the mess with modem standards: VFP, v.32/v.32bis. V.90, Kflex.
And the list just goes on and on and on, with no end in site.
That is why I decided to go with SCSI. It is an IEEE/IEE standard. That
is why I use Legacy cards whenever possible.
The next thing we have to look forward to will be a mess concerning the
USB standard if it is not already a mess. It is SUPPOSED to be the end
to port problems because of a lack of IRQ's and you supposedly can daisy
chain your external divices with USB. But wait until you get a printer
daisy chained to an external DVD drive and neither will work because
some idiot engineers came up their own idiot varitions of the USB
standard. You would think that after nearly 30 years of the micro
computer, these idiots would have learned something. Well they did, they
managed to learn how to screw things up for everyone! And they are still
doing it.
I now have a 58K moddem with both Kflex and v.90 and can get fast
connections no matter what I connect to. But with my old 28.8 VFP modem
I could not connect at 28.8 with many of the 33K and 56K modems out
there. Some of these connect would never go higher than 14.4. Why,
because of incomaptibility. No get a load of this. My ISP has two phone
numbers you can connect to, one line is for didgital modems, this is
where I get my good highspeed connect. The other number is for analog
modems and all their modems on this line are 33K. I cannot ever get a
33K connect on that line with this 56K modem and am very lucky to get a
19.2 connect and the highest I have ever gotten on the line with either
the 28.8 or the 56K is 26.4 and that is very rare. Part of this is due
to the lousy phone lines provided to us from Quest which was a mess left
over from U.S. Crap for phone system and the crap for phone center for
the analog number. For the digital line they use another service and it
is not Qwest/U.S.Crap. So the lowest I get is 48K and the highest is
52K. Usually I get 50,600 connect. I can only get a 14.4 connect on the
digital line with the 28.8 modem. That is strictly a modem compatibility
issue.
There are three wrods that should be trown out of the computer
dictionary. They are:
1. Compatible
2. Standard
3. Universal
Pat
----- Original Message -----
From: "da Silva, Joe" <Joe DOT daSilva AT emailmetering DOT com>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 8:07 PM
Subject: RE: Master/slave jumper settings
> Not really. I have an old 60M or 120M IDE drive "lying around
> somewhere", that no longer has separate Master-with-slave
> and Master-without-slave jumper settings.
>
> It has however occurred to me, that you may not be aware
> of the "Cable Select" jumper setting that exists on ATAPI
> drives (and possibly ATA drives - haven't checked recently) :
>
> Remember how IBM mutilated the Shugart floppy disk
> interface, such that you jumpered all drives as "B:" and
> used a mutilated ribbon cable, so that the drive at the end
> responded as "A:" and the drive nearest the controller
> responded as drive "B:"? Well, the ATA people (IIRC) came
> up with a similar scheme, in which you set your ATA/ATAPI
> drives to the "CS" jumper setting, and used a mutilated
> ribbon cable to assign the Master/Slave configuration of
> the two drives (in this case, the "mutilation" involved the
> removal of one conductor from the cable, between the
> two drive connectors).
>
> Joe.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Patrick Moran [SMTP:pmoran22 AT yahoo DOT com]
> > Sent: Thursday, 15 February 2001 12:52
> > To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
> > Subject: Re: Master/slave settings (was prob audio CD on 2nd CD-ROM
> > with NWCDEX)
> >
> > They must be pretty recent. I am not certain how old the CD drive is
> > that I bought for my brother, but seems like it's been within the
last
> > two years. It is a Creative Labs which also included the PnP AWE 32
> > card. He can run all of my SB-16 software on this card as well. His
CD
> > did not include some of the things I got with my SB-16 for WINDOZE
3.x
> >
> > Pat
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "da Silva, Joe" <Joe DOT daSilva AT emailmetering DOT com>
> > To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
> > Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 5:51 PM
> > Subject: RE: Master/slave settings (was prob audio CD on 2nd CD-ROM
with
> > NWCDEX)
> >
> >
> > > You are partly correct.
> > >
> > > Older drives had three settings :
> > > 1. Master drive without slave (aka. single drive).
> > > 2. Master drive with slave.
> > > 3. Slave drive.
> > >
> > > Newer drives have combined 1 & 2 by adding a few
> > > more "smarts" to their firmware.
> > >
> > > Joe.
> > >
> >
> ----- snip -----
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