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

    Oh OK, most of the PC stuff I've seen says EIDE/ATAPI, but they never
actually say its an IDE drive. Oh well. Now the controller in the Beige G3's
is just
straight DMA right? I remember that the IDE G4 has Ultra66 on it, but I'm
not sure about the G3's.

> The ``Ultra'' modes require the more expensive thin-wire ribbon cables
<snip>

    Gotta love the 80 pin cable with a 40 pin socket on Ultra66.

> 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.

    Ah, so ATAPI is the equivalent to sending SCSI commands over USB to SCSI
devices on
the USB chain to make them work that way. IDE doesn't do synchro. transfers
either does it?
While I'm on the subject, what is your take on IDE-> SCSI converters? Any
experience
with them? I need more SCSI space on my MIPS boxen :)

> 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.

    Don't you love marketing?

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

    Oh, I thought ghostscript only spoke Postscript, I'll have to DL it.

> 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.

    I figured as much when they said "This scanner works on the iMac only"
it's been interesting trying
to upgrade to the latest USB drivers since the scanner doesn't work with
them.