From: Michael Almquist Subject: TECH: talk about them buses . . . Date: Mon, 23 Mar 92 17:05:05 EST Ain't the world a wonderful place to live? Reading the recent article from comp.arch titled "the future of buses and networks" (THANKS FRAN!) is encouraging me to babble so, Anyone drooling over IDE interfaces in the PC world? They should be. You all know that the early Sequent was built from 386 processors and packed a MIGHTY PUNCH! For (16) 20MHz 386 chips working in parallel amazing speeds can be experienced! A friend (hi Dan) just bought a 386 to replace his dying machine - for $300 one can order a cheap 386 motherboard with 4 megs to boot! IDE controllers are built on the bases of creating a bridge between the AT bus and disc drive. What's to stop one from using IDE interfaces to talk between two motherboards? I have a feeling IDE is as fast if not faster than HIPPI and CONSIDERABLY cheaper than purchasing them HIPPI boards (they probably don't even make them for PCs yet). SO, a MONSTER *CHEAP* parallel punch is here - theorectically its been proven by the existence of the earlier Sequent machines (look at Milton for you Seattle dwellers). SO: $200 - 20MHz 386 DX motherboard w/ 4 serial port support (2 built on the motherboard and existing IRQs for 2 more) $ 40 - 2 port serial card (addressable IRQs for COM3 and COM4) $400 - 8megs 1x9 80ns simms $ 50 - case and power supply SO, approx. $700 per CPU system. Shrink a VR oriented kernel/operating system down in memory size and implement on either public domain 386BSD and/or Linux and/or Minix in 32-bit 386 native mode => so like 1 meg memory resident VR kernel and minimal unix kernel (Plan 9 is a good start as to what is essential for a minimalistic kernel). Thus leaving 7 megs for local memory. So like can we say like bitchin?! So, add a cheap ethernet card $150. and now be able to play - you'll have 5 communication channels available - COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, and ethernet. Perhaps some brainy people out there can figure out a way for an IDE controller to talk to another IDE controller in a different machine - now have 6 mechanisms for communications. This theorectical wish-list IDE to IDE controller - lets say like $200 a piece - $400 for two. Get carried away and have bucks to burn add a small SCSI drive and SCSI controller per board - lets say $200 for 20 meg SCSI and controller - don't need much - just local storage/swapping/etc. Hmmmm - should I blow $10k on a nice unix box or should I buy (10) 386 CPU modules - these modules having 20MHz 386 DX motherboard with 8 megs RAM, (4) serial ports, case and power supply, 20 meg SCSI and controller, and thin ethernet card. All that needs to be done now is build a VR kernel that can utilize these 5 channels - lots of proven theories out there for playing with these 5 channels (ie. bi-directional, single directional, dedicated, etc etc etc). Sounds like having fun blasting the bandwidth. If you get REAL adventurous - buy two DVI boards from Intel and put in two different networked machines and play. YEAH! So, does anyone out there know any venders selling cheap 386 motherboards that support (4) serial IRQs and two serial ports built on the motherboard (don't think anyone is selling motherboards with four serial ports). Please send me them vendor names! - Mike (almquist@brahms.udel.edu) or (squish@hitl.washington.edu)