Re: future compatibility, etc.

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

>     Apropos of AMD vs. Intel, there are other reasons for preferring the
> former. About the time of MMX (which I seem to recall was introduced by
> AMD, while Intel was dithering around with Pentium Pro and Pentium II),
> Intel stopped supporting parity and its more advanced form, ECC RAM,
> except on servers, while AMD supported both, at least through the K6-2,
> and possibly later.

Hmmm, I thought ECC RAM support was a function of the motherboard and
its particular chipset, rather than the cpu. I had ECC on the prior iteration of
this box, and have it again on the current setup (Intel P-II/450 then, P-III/850
now, on different ASUS main boards that both had BX chipsets). ECC remains
a configurable option in both respective BIOSes. So, I don't see where the cpu
comes into this . . . but maybe these boxes meet the requirements for a server.

> The thing we need to vehemently insist on is file
> compatability: any new hardware has to be able to read old media and old
> file formats.

This is more of a practical problem. Media standards keep changing. I tried hard
to transfer all my 5.25" floppies (because I'm obsessive about leaving something
behind that I or someone I know might need some day), but discovered another
couple boxes of them many months after I'd retired the drive. Do you think
anyone will know what to do with a Zip disk 15 years hence ?

> And we need to start collecting driver files. I'm going
> crazy right now with a second-hand Compaq Pentium Pro: Compaq sold it as
> a server, and supports only DOS, Novell Netware, NT (3 & 4), 2000, OS/2,
> and various flavors of UNIX/Linux. No Win 9x. The OS can be installed,
> but there seem to be no Windows 9x drivers for the VGA card (well, we
> could replace that) or the SCSI controller, which cannot be removed, so
> I've got RAM conflicts and a weeping screen.

It's no picnic trying to identify built-in components (though there are some
utilities that can help), but I have to think there must be some generic drivers
floating around to fill most any need. There are all kinds of repositories for
such things on the 'Net, it's just a matter of luck and a lot of digging.

Jordan