Hello Christopher,

   CT> As was mentioned, the onboard "MESH" SCSI chip is slow
     > narrow.  It's pretty sad to see that a G3 has not much
     > faster SCSI performance than a VAXstation. Leave it to
     > apple to be on the cutting edge of hardware design.

I can see the sense in having a basic SCSI bus on the
machine, especially given availability of existing SCSI
peripherals.  It would be nice to have a faster SCSI bus
available for hard disks but hey, at least it's not a 6200!
:-/

   CT> So much for seeing the G5 in Q3 2002 for Apple
     > computers.

What's the G5 supposed to do for us?  Is it 64-bit?

   CT> And how about that DDR RAM that makes the new G4's run
     > slower than their SDR predecessors?

Doesn't sound good.

   CT> What exactly do you want to do with it? To the best of
     > my knowledge the firewire code is under devlopment in
     > private branches and has not been merged into -current
     > yet.

Ah, we're probably getting ahead of ourselves then. He has a
FireWire equipped DV camera.  It sounds as though he'll have
to use MacOS for now to support that.

   CT> Also be advised that you will not be able to boot from
     > a Firewire or USB card. Only Macs with built in USB
     > and Firewire ports have the code needed to do this.

That was my thinking, hence my questions about the disk
interfaces available on this machine.

   CT> If you wanted to go for an all in one upgrade, Sonnet
     > has an ATA133 + Firewire + USB all on one card, no
     > idea what parts of it will work with NetBSD, I think
     > it has an ACARD based IDE chip which might be
     > bootable.

Thanks, I'll have a look for information on those.

- Andy Ball.