4 ms·
First Dual-Channel IDE?
- userbinator 5y agoThat unpopulated 68-pin connector reminds me of SCSI. Perhaps they were intending to make a combo SCSI + IDE controller, or reusing much of the PCB layout from a SCSI HBA?
- monocasa 5y agoProbably for running IDE over some external cable. The BIOS's error messages talks about "external enclosure"s.
- myself248 5y agoFor all the confused devs under age 30 in here, this is IDE meaning Integrated Drive Electronics, what later became known as ATA and then retronymmed as PATA.
- travisporter 5y agoI was really expecting to see a VScode plugin haha thanks
- codetiger 5y agoEven for devs in the late 30s, the confusion is same. First thought it was about Integrated Development Environment, was wondering what channel means here. To realise the IDE mentioned here, it took some time. :)
- hulitu 5y agoKids those days. When they buy a new phone they only look at the number of megapixels /s. People who bought computers back then (except those who just wanted an expensive toy) knew what dual channel IDE is, what does it mean if a drive is master ( sorry) or slave (sorry) and what the interrupts are.
- codetiger 5y agoYou just reminded me of the jumpers to configure master slave in IDE drives. :)
- urda 5y agoWhile they were annoying to deal with, took up a lot of space, and had fixed configurations... I do miss me some ribbon cables
- pjmlp 5y agoFor the devs above 30 IDE could apply to Integrated Development Environment as well. Since the context is MS-DOS, Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Quick Basic, Quick Pascal, QBasic, Clipper, FoxPro among a few lesser ones. Or given the Website name, Visual Age for Smalltalk, Visual Age for C++, Borland C++ for OS/2.
- userbinator 5y agoI'm 30+ and it actually took me some time to realise the other meaning, since I don't use IDEs (the software) much at all, but was very familiar with the IDE hardware interface from embedded systems work. Although I am not sure about the history of the term Integrated Development Environment and its acronymisation, I don't think the early IDEs were called such --- the acronym IDE was basically exclusively used for the disk interface.
- StephenJGL 5y agoDelphi had an IDE and there were others. That's early 90s.
- vidarh 5y agoDid they call it that? There were IDEs of sort long before Delphi (staying with the Pascal family, even pre-Delphi Turbo Pascal sort of fits - letting you compile and run straight from the editor well back into the 80s), but most were not called an IDE.
- pjmlp 5y agoThe IDE term already pops up on Xerox PARC documentation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Development_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Development_Environmen... You just need to dive into the Xerox Development Environment papers and documentation for the Alto (1977).
- krylon 5y agoGood point. But what is a dual-channel Integrated Development Environment? ... Maybe an early form of pair programming? EDIT: ;-)
- anigbrowl 5y agoI installed a bunch of these and loved them compared to the head-scratching misery of SCSI - which had far superior performance but also many more opportunities for things to go wrong. Those BIOS screens brought back memories of watching machines count slowly up to 8mb of RAM and thinking 'what a beast...one day I too shall own a machine of such power.'
- hestefisk 5y agoI thought IDE was a nightmare, cheap and unreliable compared to SCSI. For instance, one has to fiddle around with jumper settings on each connected IDE device (master, slave!) whereas SCSI was a lot more intelligent and stable (and obviously a lot more expensive). I still have my old Adaptec 19160U somewhere, it’s a really beautiful piece of engineering.
- bogantech 5y agoYou need to jumper each SCSI device to set an address too but I guess sometimes the defaults don't clash?
- morsch 5y agoIDE drives had two jumpers to set master vs slave, SCSI drives had four jumpers or dip switches to configure the bus id... And having to terminate the bus was kind of annoying. I'm sure things got more convenient (but didn't late era PATA also have auto configure for master/slave?).
- acchow 5y agoWhy does an IDE adapter need an FCC application?
- jes 5y agoIn general, if you manufacture and sell a product that can radiate radio frequency energy, it needs to conform to regulations from governmental agencies like the Federal Communications Commission in the United States.
- hestefisk 5y agoObscure piece of hardware! Why would anyone who needs up to 16 drives in a single system not use SCSI? IDE was never designed for more than two drives per bus connector (eg a 3.5” hard drive and a 5.25” zip / cd rom drive).
- hakfoo 5y agoI could imagine it being useful for an imaging setup-- an OEM could use it to generate hundreds of identical drives.
- hulitu 5y agoSCSI was expensive. Also i don't know if your favourite Intel CPU was able to take advantage of the SCSI bandwidth for 16 devices. With IDE, AFAIK you can talk to only 1 device at a time.