Rob writes....

>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.
>

But your choices will be limited....of course in UNx your choices are limited
anyway so maybe that's why it doesn't matter to you. EISA was not widely
accepted, not only because it wasn't fast enough, but because its a bear to
manufacture cards.

>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.

But it would be questionable. ISA and EISA on a PCI motherboard are secondary
busses, and are much slower than all ISA or all EISA MBs. I'm not even sure that
its possible to do single-cycle burst BM cycles on a bridged bus, in which
case EISA
speed would be seriously compromised. Pretty difficult to test, though.

>
>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.

Not without serious compromises on the secondary busses.

>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.

Perhaps, but there are probably 50 times more new ISA cards coming out on the 
market than PCI and EISA combined. People like their cheap motherboards and
plug in modems and soundblasters.....

db
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