Fwd: Re: scd and mcd

[Andrew Lankford]

My last desktop machine had an ASUS Pentium-3 (no ISA slots), USB1 
only.  It has outlived the original hard drive, CDROM, and power supply, 
but I think it makes more sense these days to throw these systems out 
rather than "future-proof" them, especially if a fanless SoC could be 
less power-hungry and noisy.   It seems to me that people who want to 
get more life out 10yr old hardware need to be part of some sort of 
trimmed down "LegacyBSD" project that caters to their special needs.  
You all know more than I do about the orgs that are following the 
stable-6 or stable-7 branches, but are they using  ancient CDROMS with a 
limited life span?

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Subject: 	Re: scd and mcd
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From: 	Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>
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On Apr 23, 2011, at 5:19 PM, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:

>  Warner Losh<imp at bsdimp.com>  wrote:
>
>>  mcd and scd are ISA-only devices ... They were important for the
>>  386 (now not supported) and 486 machines.  Since the 486 machines
>>  in question maxed out at 32MB, and 8.x has trouble running in 32MB
>>  on x86, I'm guessing there aren't too many 486 SX/DX machines
>>  running 8.x.
>
>  486 were the last for which ISA was the primary bus, but ISA was
>  still present (bridged from PCI) on most Pentium systems and common
>  at least as recently as Pentium-II.  (I don't have a disassembled
>  P-III handy to check whether it has an ISA slot.)

Most Pentium II and newer systems had IDE connectors on the motherboard.  Many of the Pentium I ones did too.  Only if you didn't have IDE connectors on mobo would you be likely to consider one of these CD's.  Also, I think they topped out at 4x or 8x speed since they had a custom interface.

Warner