PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware
>   From: Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net>
>   Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 11:00:30 -0500
>     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>> This doesn't work well when you have a recent enough machine that it 
>> doesn't have ISA slots.  Heck, I've got UNIX boxes from 1996 (getting 
>> nearly on topic now) that have PCI but no ISA slots.
>> 
>Well, PCI was and is perceived as a 'good thing' and was never
>PC-specific.  It's no surprise that UNIX vendors adopted PCI but never
>touched ISA.  (didn't SGI have ISA, or maybe EISA slots, in some of
>their workstations?)
>
>I don't have any machines 'recent' enough that they don't have ISA
>slots, for the record.  And, in fact, the particular Dell Optiplexes
>that I continue to drone on about have a LOT of ISA slots if the
>motherboard is installed in the mini-tower case.  More, even, than we
>had available on a stock PC-AT once you tied up a bunch of the slots
>with disk controller, video, network card, etc.

I've worked with a few machines that had NO ISA slots and the 
solution was PCI cards as they were available to do the job.

With many of the cheaper all_on_one mainboards it was convenient to
disable board level resources like video or sound to use a better
or more convenient PCI or even ISA board.  In some cases I did that 
avoid the sound system they used because it was impossible to get
a good driver for the OS in question at that time.  I never regarded
that as a big deal or even difficult. 


Allison