A Brief History of I/O

[@Jmvars]

I'm not a programmer but I watch all of Benno Rice, dude knows his stuff and how to keep me engaged.

[@tanveerhasan2382]

I concur

[@edgeeffect]

I quite like Benno's talks anyway.... but that was BRILLIANT! A few historical notes from an old git: I saw a working magnetic drum sometime around 1982. The great irony with the EISA Vs MCA "war" was that pretty much no one gave a fsck! Instead we used VESA local bus for a temporary stop gap for video and HDD cards (yes Hard disks had their own controller card) and once it no longer "stopped the gap" PCI was around... I had a bunch of scraped MCA machines to play with just a few years later... and have never ever seen an EISA card in my life. Oh god, yeah, and those scrapped MCA machines I played with... each card needed a bloody boot floppy to configure it's IRQ, Address, etc. A BOOT FLOPPY! GAH!

[@RonJohn63]

EISA cards were really popular in the server world back in the day.

[@leviathanfafner]

Fantastic talk, really gives a great history of how interdevice I/O Also, busbars have their origin in eletrical power distribution; there are bars of solid copper that carry high current electricity where an equivalent sized wire(s) would be impractical. They are also used in modular cabinets to allow safe live disconnecting and reconnection to a live bus. The same action as racking in a hard drive or card. The similarity in that action to installing/removing early computer and electrical control systems componets is probably where the bus first got its name.

[@CypherOzzie]

VMS QIO is awesome - miss it

[@flippert0]

I'm quite old, but came late to computing (early 90s). I only ever saw 10Base2, not 10Base5

[@quilnux]

Does anyone have a picture of the old bus bar (power) he was referring to around 16:55? I would like to see what that looked like but searching for it doesn't seem to bring up any old pictures of one.

[@RonJohn63]

Google "electrical bus bar". That's how I found pictures.

[@TheClonerx]

uhm