the stigmata of IBM feces

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Tony Duell may have mentioned these words:
>[snippage]
>
>As a hardware hacker ...
>
>I dislike the PC because of all thr totally stupid design decisions in it
>(many of which seem to have been done to save a $0.10 IC and cause
>headaches for users (not just hackers) for evermore). It appears that if
>there were 2 ways of doing something, they picked the wrong one.

If the CoCo didn't run such a kick-butt processor (6809) and a kick-butt OS 
(OS-9) I'd feel the same way about it...

... Granted, you can't *technically* blame RatShack over that -- they only 
copied Motorola's reference design!

>As regards larger IBMs, It appears that they were never properly
>docuemented (outside IBM, that is), and are stuffed with custom silicon.
>The thread on the AS400 confirms this view -- the fact that for the CISC
>machiens even the native instruction set was not published. And of course
>there werr not full schematics available.

I just stumbled across some boards I'd stowed from some older IBM 
cash-register machines -- I can figure out some of the major chips (EPROMS, 
RAM, some of the CPUs, etc.) but other than that, they're pointless to me 
and I'm getting ready to dump 'em; no good to me if I can't even part 'em 
out to make something kewl...

Anywho, back to the real world... Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | A new truth in advertising slogan
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | for MicroSoft: "We're not the oxy...
zmerch at 30below.com          |                         ...in oxymoron!"