ISA can in practical application support about 7 or 8 megabits/second, 
which is faster than what USB can in reality do. USB is crap. If nothing
else, its a kludgy, ugly, half-assed design and its also a closed standard
that is controlled and licensed by a consortium of companies. use an _open_
standard for gods sake! The Q22 bus can in practical application support
just under 3 megabytes a second, max, and closer to 2 in everyday life. Its
more than enough for USB, but again, USB is garbage. Though 1394 is _way_
faster than the Qbus, it'd be much cooler to see 1394 support for
my VAX than USB! I like the good ol' serial standard weve had for twenty
years and more, designed by real engineers and not marketing hype like
USB!!! USB sucks! there is no single more universal and clean and standard
interface than the basic RS232 serial interface. it has NOTHING more than is
necessary, is easy as pie to interface things to, is so simple that 
standardized interface chips can be bought in quantity for only a few cents
each, and even one at a time for under a buck, simple enough that you can 
interface to it by hand with a few transistors and resistors, flexible enough
that you can put one on almost anything, and has no higher-level 
limitations or protocol layeredon it  aside from the passing of bits from
one end of the wire to the other! the signal range is wide enough that noise
can be handled in almost any environment (but then again its generous so that
many cheapo implementations can get away with much less and then get 
sucky serial interfaces), and it is so general purpose that you can take 
asynchrnonous serial data from anythign to anything wihtout a problem. 
dont use USB, which has none of the good things of real serial async 
interfaces and has a lot of cost, licensing, closed,controlled stadards, 
and useless complexity! 

i may as well flame out the PCI bus and the whole IBM PC architecture while
im at it!!!! i'd like to see a 50 MHz TURBOchannel machine much more than
a PCI machine! and it would be simpler to make and cheaper to implement
than PCI, and mor flexible as well!!! it wouldnt impose architectural 
restrictions inherited from the crummy PeeCee world like PCI does! PCI only
won because it started out in the wrold of such huge volume sales that it 
edged everybody else out of business through an economy of scale and low 
prices. that doesnt make it good! at real transfers my 25 MHz TC DECstation
can pump data through its bus faster than most PeeCees that are ten times as
powerful can through their PCI buses, because TC has a low-overhead 
protocol and has no arcitectural hindrances! just look at the disgusting 
memory model that the PC architecture is hobbled with! oi!!! 

1394, now, thats a slick and well-done piece of engineering. 

happy hacking,
isildur


 On Wed, 7 Jul 1999, Allison J Parent wrote:

> < > There are ISA USB controllers?  The only ones I've seen are for PCI...
> <
> <Yah, I've certainly never seen an ISA USB controller...
> 
> Neither have I.  I think ISA is not fast enough to support the faster USB 
> rates.  I'd think Qbus would have problems too.
> 
> Allison
> 
> 
>