On Sun, 20 Feb 2000, Chris Tribo wrote:

> ATAPI is an earlier (slower) version of today's IDE, correctly called EIDE.

The speed progression of IDE is
 PIO
 DMA
 Ultra33-DMA
 Ultra66-DMA

The ``Ultra'' modes require the more expensive thin-wire ribbon cables
like the Macs ship with, and they also do CRC's on each transfer so if
your cabling is inadequate you'll get errors printed on the console,
rather than the data corruption that you get with PIO or DMA mode and
crappy cables.

ATAPI is ATA Programming Interface, sort of like how scsipi in NetBSD is
the software command component of SCSI.  ATAPI is a way of sending some of
the SCSI commands over the inferior IDE electrical standard, and indeed
SCSI drivers like cd, sd, and uk attach to both the atapibus and the
scsibus in NetBSD (while Linux uses redundant code for this). This ATAPI
kludge is how CD-ROM's were made to work on the IDE bus, which is
otherwise a descendent of the hard-disk-only PeeCee ST506 standard.

EIDE is equivalent to LBA, which is a feature of PeeCee BIOS's for using
hard disks larger than 528MB.  EIDE is for all practical purposes
meaningless.

> do we have anything that will print to a PCL5 printer through a
> USB->parallel converter yet?

Check out ghostscript in pkgsrc, and ulpt(4).

> I've got a USB scanner too :)

Save up and buy a SCSI scanner.  All i've read on the lists is that
scanner companies don't release documentation or comply with standards, so
USB scanners don't work, and there is no change in this on the horizon.

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:+1 720 841-8308 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US