Re: Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?

On 5/21/2025 9:19 PM, George Neuner wrote:

On Wed, 21 May 2025 15:06:27 -0400, EricP
<ThatWouldBeTelling@thevillage.com> wrote:
 

Anton Ertl wrote:

EricP <ThatWouldBeTelling@thevillage.com> writes:

 

When I installed WinNT 3.1 (beta) in 1992 it came with explicit
instructions that HDD must use write-through caching, which was
enabled/disabled by a jumper pin on the drive.

>
SCSI or PATA?
>
- anton

>
IIRC it needed a SCSI board for the CD-ROM drive (I don't remember why,
I just remember being miffed that I had to buy one) but could use IDE HDD.
As the SCSI HDD were the same drives but with a SCSI interface were
$100 more expensive, I would have used the IDE.
>
WinNT was developed on MIPS R4000 and ported to 80386/486 later.
Those MIPS systems used all SCSI so maybe they hadn't had time to port
the CD-ROM drivers to IDE but had ported the HDD drivers to IDE
before the beta release.

 I think the problem went back farther than that.  I recall CD drives
[and printers also] running on PC-DOS/MS-DOS in the late 80s using
some kind of lobotomized SCSI controllers that would /not/ also work
for SCSI HDDs.

I also remember from some early 90s PCs some CD-ROM drives that used some sort of non-standard interface. Typically, they would plug into an ISA card with a cable that was (IIRC) somewhat narrower than a normal IDE cable (I remember it being around the width of a floppy cable; two ends with a direct connection, and no twists, unlike a typical floppy cable which usually has part of the cable twisted).
Not entirely sure what it was. Wasn't an IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM though, do know this much at least...
Digging more, there was apparently a proprietary 34-pin Sony connector, which does at least resemble what I remember (and some of the drives do look like the drives I remember seeing).
What I had seen of SCSI drives was that they typically had somewhat wider ribbon cables (had encountered these a few times as well, *).
*: Had once encountered a computer (that at the time was being discarded, but I got it and had it for a while). It had SCSI drives, and also the weirdness that rather than the CPU and RAM being on the motherboard, it was on a riser card (the MOBO was IIRC effectively just card slots, IIRC they resembled 16-bit ISA slots buts with a long extended part on the front; similar to the "VESA Local Bus" IIRC).
IIRC, no connectors on the MOBO (apart from power IIRC), all of the external connections (like VGA and mouse/keyboard) being on riser cards.
I remember the CPU riser card apparently having dual 486DX's, but from what information I can gather, multi-socket systems weren't a thing with the 486, so don't know what was going on there. Beyond this, was SIMM RAM, and a lot of other stuff you would normally see on the MOBO (excluding connectors).
It was a weird machine, I had managed to get Win NT4 installed on it, but I remember I couldn't do much else with it at the time. Also for some unknown reason, while normal 16-bit ISA cards would plug into the slots, they did not seem to be recognized by the OS.
Seemingly, there was a lot of weird stuff back when I was young, and sometimes it is difficult to find much information about it (or to confirm that it actually existed).
Though, a lot of times, with some digging I can confirm that various weird stuff from my distant past did in fact exist.
...