Re: Switching audio via an Ocelot and SECU's

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Jeff Volp" <JeffVolp@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:JyLEf.328284$qk4.277417@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I understand your point a lot better now.
>
> But, PCs aren't quite that interchangeable.

I challenge you to name something similar that's *more* interchangeable!
They are the most universally interchangeable commodity that I know of.
Maker A's board usually runs in Maker B's PC without problems.  Try that
with home automation equipment from  Z-wave, ZigBee, Centralite, HAI, X-10,
Insteon, and on and on.  For a while it was stabilized quite nicely with
lots of different manufacturers adhering to the X-10 protocol, but Babel has
come to HA.

> I've got a box full of ISA
> boards that won't plug into any current motherboard.

Well, I'd have a hard time plugging radio tubes into these teensy IC
sockets!  Should there never be any progress?  You could take those cards
and plug them into any motherboard that still has an ISA slot and they would
work.  You could sit all day in front of a Z-Wave switch with an X-10
controller and not get anywhere.  That's what I am talking about when I say
interchangeable.  Maker A's board works with maker B's computer.

> I do use the only P5 motherboard I could find that still accepted an
> ISA board.

There have to be allowances for architectural advances.  In the PC world,
when the ISA bus became too slow, the PCI bus (and for a short while, the
EISA bus) took its place.  You could take virtually any PCI card from
manufacturer A and stick it in any PCI slot from manufacturer B and it would
work.  Let's compare that situation with home automation.

Like ISA, the X-10 bus has *almost* run out of gas.  Instead of moving from
one standard to another, we have at least 6 competing standards on the
market now with very little interchangeability.  Then there's the AV market
where devices all have proprietary remotes, S-Links, etc.  When you get to
automobiles, about the only parts that you can interchange between makers
are batteries, lamps and fuses and some fluids.  SLR cameras had only a
flash shoe, a tripod socket and a film size that was standardized.
Everything else was "manufacturer's choice."  There would be no mounting
Canon lenses on Nikon bodies with adapters that usually did not support all
the features of either the lens or the camera.

> Then there is the continuing evolution of harddrive interfaces.

The key word is evolution.  When we jumped from ATA33 to ATA133 tremendous
efforts were made to keep things backward compatible.  You could install a
new controller in your old PC to run the new drives easily *because* the PCI
bus had long been standardized.  I've done it many times as the various HD
size barriers were crossed.  Now almost all new boards come with both PATA
and SATA drive connectors to ease the transition to ATA150, just as there
was a time when motherboards came with both ISA and PCI slots - to ease the
transition.  So far only Dave Houston and Smarthome appear to have given any
thought to interoperability among HA equipment.

There isn't any consumer product that's nearly as standardized as desktop
PCs.  Interestingly enough, for a long time there was chaos reigning in the
laptop arena because each maker made their own disk drives, memory strips,
batteries, etc.  It's gotten a little better because competitively, you can
build better and cheaper if you standardize and are able to source parts
from more than one supplier.

> Don't forget the ATX  update that rendered the old cases obsolete.

The ATX standard was SUCH an improvement over the old cases with the "wire
by hand" rat's nest of ribbon cables and pin headers that most PC people
were quite happy to get rid of the old cases.  Reliability shot up
tremendously as a result of attaching all the I/O connectors to the
motherboard.  It should be noted that ASUS did make boards that fit into
either style case for a time - once again to ease the transition.  I still
own two and they are still working hard as general purpose PC's.  If the
case PS dies I can move the board to an ATX style.  There's nothing else I
can think of that's so adaptable.

FWIW, the ATX standard has changed slightly again with the addition of a
separate 4 wire cable to supply power directly to the PC.  This had to be
added because CPU's got so powerful they began drawing more current than the
original power supply spec provided for.  But that's a good thing, not a bad
one because it's easy to buy and mount a new PS in an ATX case.  Why?
They're standardized!  Four screws and that PS is outta there.

> Yes, we can plug that junk  back together an get a running obsolete
computer.
> Why?

Because some very specialized apps require ISA.  I have an old SLT laptop
connected to a RatShack digital multimeter, turning an old piece of "junk"
into quite a powerful and useful data recorder.  Another one's working as a
firewall and others do intermittent service as RS-232 terminals, etc.  Still
another had a specialized digital audio capture board to connect to my Sony
DAT recorder.  ISA only.  My X-10 CP290 won't talk to anything new-fangled,
either!

I have, however, scrapped all my 486's full sized PC's, only because I have
enough old laptops and other PC's to more than cover my needs.

--
Bobby G.