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- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!cats.ucsc.edu!haynes
- From: haynes@cats.ucsc.edu (Jim Haynes)
- Newsgroups: comp.arch
- Subject: Whatever happened to govt. std. peripheral interface?
- Date: 11 Dec 1992 19:12:02 GMT
- Organization: University of California; Santa Cruz
- Lines: 27
- Distribution: na
- Message-ID: <1gap62INNkf8@darkstar.UCSC.EDU>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: hobbes.ucsc.edu
-
-
- I remember some years ago the U.S. govt. was getting set to require all
- vendors selling to the government to use a standard peripheral interface
- so they could have competition in the peripherals market. The standard
- was going to be the IBM channel-to-control-unit interface because there was
- already competition in peripherals for IBM 360 systems. The other
- mainframe makers were against it because (a) they didn't want competition,
- wanted to keep their proprietary interfaces, (b) they didn't want to redesign
- products to use a different interface, (c) they thought their own interfaces
- were better (like not being limited to 8 bits wide). The minicomputer makers
- didn't like it because it was very costly to implement, compared to what
- they were offering. Even IBM didn't want it (a) because they wanted to
- be able to change the interface to thwart the plug-compatible peripheral
- vendors, and (b) because they didn't want to be bound to an interface
- that was showing its age even at the time.
-
- Whatever happened - did the standardization effort die from lack of
- support? Or was it enacted and then so many exemptions were given
- that it became meaningless?
- --
- haynes@cats.ucsc.edu
- haynes@cats.bitnet
-
- "Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was!"
- "No it aint! But ya gotta know the territory!"
- Meredith Willson: "The Music Man"
-
-