Verily did dennis write:

> Lots of "dead" busses are still around...but when people stop developing new
> products it time to look elsewhere. 4 PCI slots is usually plenty, as beyond

The fact that someone has stopped developing new products for a given group
isn't a deciding factor to change the "group", but usually a deciding
factor to change the "someone".  Lots of people were screaming "EISA is
dead" before Adaptec developed the EISA 100BaseT nic.  If 3Com happens to
not bother with an EISA 100BaseT card, then I guess they won't make any
money off of the sale of them.  :>  If they do release one, then that proves
that another corporation doesn't feel that EISA is dead.

> disk, video and ethernet there is limited advantage. There is little value
> running modems or 56k devices PCI....all PCI machines are a crapshoot as
> the number of products for ISA is astronomical and you simply can't use
> one in an all PCI machine.

Why not?  A lot of motherboards today are including I/O as well.  I've seen
several machines that had only three cards in them, and all three were PCI.

Also, you apparently have not seen a motherboard with 8 ISA slots and 4
PCI slots.  It is physically possible to have a motherboard with 8 PCI
slots and 8 ISA slots without needing a special case.

It's also physically possible to have a motherboard with 8 PCI slots
and 8 EISA slots (mmm), and this motherboard would be a superset of the
8/8 PCI/ISA motherboard.

> They'll be out there...but it will be awhile before they're the standard. 
> "You" server guys are a serious minority and are likely to stay that way.
> Your "Jake Foo" character is a tiny, tiny pct of the marketplace.

Now, yes.  Dual-head PeeSea's weren't a reality until recently.  Even NT
supports two Matrox Millennium cards.

You're going to see more of the new machines have nothing but PCI cards
due to the use of I/O on the motherboard.  After all, ISA is old and
dying.

> PS: Didn't I read that NetBSD doesn't support PCI-PCI bridges?

NetBSD also doesn't support "bounce buffers" (last I heard).

The point is that EISA may be old and dying, but it's not the only thing,
it still breathes, and it's still fast enough for drives.  PCI is limited,
especially from the NetBSD point of view.

-- Rob
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