---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996 10:06:40 -0600 (CST)
From: The Great Mr. Kurtz <David A. Gatwood> <davagatw@mars.utm.edu>
To: Steve Allen <allen@cssg4.cslab.ds.boeing.com>
Subject: Re: MacBSD on Powerbook 230 (fwd)

On Tue, 2 Jan 1996, Steve Allen wrote:

> On Jan 2,  2:30pm, "The Great Mr. Kurtz <davagatw@mars.utm.edu>" wrote:
> >They're all SCSI (on Mac, anyway).  There was some special type of SCSI 
> >internal drive used on a few of the 040 systems that behaved strangely.  
> >Looking at the FAQ on puma, I see it is the IDE drive used in a handful 
> >of Quadras.
> 
> No, IDE is _not_ SCSI.  IDE is what PCs have been using for ages, and now
> Apple is starting to use it because it's marginally cheaper.  The systems
> that have internal IDE also have an external SCSI connector, I believe...

Yes, they do, or at least that's what the FAQ implies, and I doubt Apple 
would completely make everybody's external SCSI drives useless.  We'd 
have heard about it long ago.  Sorry.  I was thinking that the PC system was 
EISA or something like that.  PC's aren't exactly something I like to work 
with -- especially inside....   BTW, if it's just a PC drive, why 
not swipe the driver code from the PC version of NetBSD and recompile?

Thoughts on this?  What kind of obscure internal bus controller do those 
things use, anyway?  Is it marginally compatible with the standard SCSI 
controller hardware of the other Macs?  What's the drive format itself?  
Does it behave to the MacOS like any other drive through the new SCSI 
manager software?  If it's a totally different drive standard, does that 
mean they modified the ROMs for compatibility?  And if so, what changes 
will NetBSD have to make to ensure compatibility with the new ROM set?  
And if not, how do the new drives interface with the ROMs differently?  
And if they don't, how come they won't work with NetBSD?

I like strings of questions that lead in a circle.

 /---------------------------------------------------------------------\
|David A. Gatwood             And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,  |
|davagatw@mars              Went home and put a bullet through his head.|
|dgatwood@nyx.cs.du.edu              --Edwin Arlington Robinson         |
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