> >I've always thought it was a bit odd that someone who could go and
> >put a thousand dollars worth of RAM in their machine couldn't afford
> >another two hundred for a new PCI motherboard and NCR controller.
> *sigh* As Peter has already pointed out, one of the reasons people run
> free OS's is because of the cost.  Maybe the memory was scavenged from
> an older MB?  Maybe it was lent by a friend who upgraded his MB?

Or even more obvious:  when I upgraded from 8MB to 16MB, I had 8 1MB SIMMs
sitting around doing nothing.  For a mere $0,000.00 I *could* expand to
20MB *if* the 1542 driver could cope; instead, I'm supposed to roughly
*double* the cost of expanding from 8 to 20MB by changing the motherboard
and controller as well?

> And even worse, it's the worst sort of OS snobbery
> ("The OS I use only works on Gateway 2000s built between 9/94 and 11/94!
> It's the best free Unix of all!").

V7 UNIX on the PDP 11/70 handled the UNIBUS-to-Massbus adapter quite well.
(Even better after an improvment I mailed to the unix-wizards list back
when I was still hacking V7.)  The approach then was definitely *not* "well,
go buy a Massbus disk adapter, UNIBUS is too limiting for OUR tastes."

Software has to work around hardware crocks all the time (heck, isn't that
what an i386 operating system amounts to anyway ;-) ); why should this crock
be any different?  Code to accomplish this has been offered by a number of
people.  Rather than continuing to wait for someone to be struck with a divine
revelation of a perfectly architecture-neutral scheme, it seems like the
most sensible approach at this point is to choose a good *existing* strategy,
commit it as an architecture-and-card-specific fix; *then* work on improving
it to be as general as it ought to be.  Who knows, maybe that would provide
the impetus for someone to actually *do* that last bit of work; the current
strategy certainly isn't making any progress!