🚀 go-pugleaf

Keywords: NuBus, VME, slotted Mac

In regards to the question of the next generation Macintosh using VME or
NuBus, you should find it interesting that between the IEEE standards 
committees for VME and NuBus, Apple is very active and only active on
the NuBus (proposed IEEE-696 Std).  This is very interesting!  Apple
has made suggestions to the IEEE-696 committee to make interfacing
to NuBus an even easier task and has propose a second smaller
microcomputer interface card.

I believe that Apple is very concerned about making a bus decision which
they will have to live with for many years.  And when Apple looked at 
VME they saw too many long term problems that outweighed any short term
marketing benefits of using VME.  Apple sees in NuBus a much more 
straight forward bus implementation and with their recommendations a
much easier bus to interface with by 3rd parties.

I also believe that a recent issue of Computer Design reported that 
Apple has signed an agreement with TI concerning the NuBus.  This 
would be a very strange move for Apple if they were heading in the
VME path.
--

	Cliff Huff
	Software Engineering Institute
	Carnegie-Mellon University
	Pittsburgh, PA 15213
	ARPRANET: cch@sei.cmu.edu

I made an earlier posting about the proposed IEEE standard for the NuBus
being IEEE-696.  I was wrong (IEEE-696 is for the old S-100 bus).

I believe the correct IEEE number for the NuBus is IEEE-896.  

Does anyone know for certain?

Sorry about the incorrect information...
--
        Cliff Huff
        Software Engineering Institute
        Carnegie-Mellon University
        Pittsburgh, PA 15213
        ARPRANET: cch@sei.cmu.edu

In article <842@gould9.UUCP>, joel@gould9.UUCP (Joel West) writes:
> Would anyone care to comment on the technical advantages to using
> either bus?  From a marketing standpoint, I would think VME would
> offer a strong advantage.

The advantages to a company of using a standard bus are mainly these:

 * Your customers can plug in lots of cards to customize their system.

 * Your customers can benefit from new technologies faster because you
(or they) can get new cards from third parties.  Disks, disk controllers,
networking cards, tapes, serial ports, etc are all easier to buy than to
build, and the companies that specialize in building them often do a
better job than a system manufacturer like Apple would.  (Remember the
horrible Apple hard disks?  Remember the slow Mac floppies?  The Mac
network that only talks to itself?  Third parties would go bankrupt if
they tried to sell such stuff.)

The Nu bus is not a standard, and has been adopted by few companies.
The VMEbus is, and seems to be the "Multibus of the '80s" as far as
peripheral card availability.  By the way, it is a "VMEbus", and the
cards that go in it are "VMEbus cards", not "VME cards".  You don't
talk about plugging Uni cards into your Unibus, do you?

The other important characteristic of a system bus is that it not get in
the way.  But this is less important than the above.  Things that you
really need to be fast (e.g. main memory) can be put on a private bus.
It's a real drag waiting a few years to be able to plug in a simple thing
like a cheap or fast hard disk because nobody has built the controller for
your system.  Mac and Lisa owners (pre-mac plus) know about this.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
  Overheard at a funeral: "I know this may be an awkward time, but do
  you recall him ever mentioning source code?"		-- Charles Addams

In article <367@aw.sei.cmu.edu.sei.cmu.edu> cch@cg.sei.cmu.edu.UUCP (PUT YOUR NAME HERE) writes:
>
>I believe the correct IEEE number for the NuBus is IEEE-896.  
>
>Does anyone know for certain?

	IEEE P896 is the Futurebus standard.
-- 
Motorola Semiconductor Inc.                Hunter Scales
Austin, Texas           {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax,gatech}!ut-sally!oakhill!hunter

(I am responsible for myself and my dog and no-one else)

In article <1240@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>
>The Nu bus is not a standard, and has been adopted by few companies.
>The VMEbus is, and seems to be the "Multibus of the '80s" as far as
>peripheral card availability.  By the way, it is a "VMEbus", and the
>cards that go in it are "VMEbus cards", not "VME cards".  You don't
>talk about plugging Uni cards into your Unibus, do you?

And NuBus (IEEE 1196; IEEE 896 is Futurebus) is not Nu bus.

I don't know your definition of standard, but as far as the IEEE is
concerned neither is a standard, and both are awaiting approval by the
Computer Society's Microprocessor Standards Committee (MSC).  Multibus II
is also at this stage, while Futurebus has been approved by the MSC.

If your definition of standard is based on the number of companies using
the bus, then yes, VMEbus is much more widely used.

If your definition of standard is based on the number of options and
incompatabilities allowed by a specification, then NuBus wins hands down.
With NuBus you don't have the problems of differing address and data widths,
and a free for all in the use of the address space.

NuBus was developed at MIT.  Western Digital went into the business of
building boards for MIT and the NuMachine, and for LMI.  TI bought this
business from Western Digital, and uses NuBus in their AI machines.
The principal players at WD, and then TI, now work at Corollary.
George White of Corollary is the chairman of the IEEE 1196 committee.

NuBus, along with Multibus II and Futurebus, can all be classified as
modern, full feature buses, while VMEbus is a wide Multibus with an improved
electrical environment.

John Theus
Futurebus Parallel Protocol Coordinator
Tektronix, Inc.

In article <1240@hoptoad.uucp>, gnu@hoptoad.UUCP writes:
> The advantages to a company of using a standard bus are mainly these:
> 
>  * Your customers can plug in lots of cards to customize their system.
> 
>  * Your customers can benefit from new technologies faster because you
> (or they) can get new cards from third parties.  Disks, disk controllers,
> networking cards, tapes, serial ports, etc are all easier to buy than to
> build, and the companies that specialize in building them often do a
> better job than a system manufacturer like Apple would.  (Remember the
> horrible Apple hard disks?  Remember the slow Mac floppies?  The Mac
> network that only talks to itself?  Third parties would go bankrupt if
> they tried to sell such stuff.)

There's an additional advantage to a company making a system using a
standard bus, and its an advantage that companies can relate to
(although many haven't yet figured it out):  People will *buy* a
system using a standard bus.  When the time comes to look at a peripheral,
use of a standard bus means there will be different vendors to choose
from.  Different vendors means competition and that means lower prices.
Look at the available prices for SCSI disks for the Mac and you'll
get the drift.

John's point about getting new technology faster is well taken.
Just consider what might have happened had the original Mac been
designed using the Multibus: instant Ethernet, instant hard disks,
instant streaming tape.  You could've put a Fujitsu Eagle on a Mac
if you had the money.  There have been 1024 x 1024 x 8-bit, full color
image processing boards available for the Multibus for several years
now.  Actually, John didn't take it far enough.  This isn't new
technology, it's current technology that wasn't available because
somebody thought it would be more FUN FOR THEM to design a new bus.

It's my belief that a Mac with a Multibus would have buried the IBM PC,
rather than giving it some stiff competition like the real Mac did.  In
addition, a whole lot of the criticism leveled at the Mac by the trade
press would never have even occurred.  Face up to it: a lot of corporate
DP managers that buy PCs read the trade press.  A Multibus with just 2
extra slots would have meant a lot and would have been worth paying for.

But NOOOOOOOO!

Instead, Apple locked people into a proprietary "bus" (if that's what
one chooses to call it) when they couldn't deliver the goods: hard
disks) for well over a year, a SECOND floppy for months.  That hurt
us and it hurt Apple.  The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) has
burned many a company.

There's only one company in the world that can dare to try locking
customers into its products, and that's IBM.  I don't like it, but
it's a FACT.

An aside: From the little I know, it sounds like the VMEbus is a better
bus (now) than the (older) Multibus is now.  I used it in my discussion
above because it was probably the best available choice when the Mac was
designed.  It would still serve well today for a small computer like the
Mac or IBM PC.
-- 
Larry Tepper	    {ihnp4 | allegra}!drutx!druil!lat	+1-303-538-1759

In article <796@oakhill.UUCP> hunter@oakhill.UUCP (Hunter Scales) writes:
>In article <367@aw.sei.cmu.edu.sei.cmu.edu> cch@cg.sei.cmu.edu.UUCP (PUT YOUR NAME HERE) writes:
>>
>>I believe the correct IEEE number for the NuBus is IEEE-896.  
>>
>>Does anyone know for certain?
>
>	IEEE P896 is the Futurebus standard.
>-- 
>Motorola Semiconductor Inc.                Hunter Scales
>Austin, Texas           {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax,gatech}!ut-sally!oakhill!hunter
>
>(I am responsible for myself and my dog and no-one else)

Here at Berkeley, I was able to read this message four separate times
(this was the fourth).  Is it the poster's fault, the net's, or our
news managing software's?

Ethan Munson
munson@ernie.berkeley.edu

In article <203@druil.UUCP> lat@druil.UUCP (TepperL) writes:
>
>But NOOOOOOOO!
>
>Instead, Apple locked people into a proprietary "bus" (if that's what
>one chooses to call it) when they couldn't deliver the goods: hard
>disks) for well over a year, a SECOND floppy for months.  That hurt
>us and it hurt Apple.  The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) has
>burned many a company.
>
>There's only one company in the world that can dare to try locking
>customers into its products, and that's IBM.  I don't like it, but
>it's a FACT.
>
>-- 
>Larry Tepper	    {ihnp4 | allegra}!drutx!druil!lat	+1-303-538-1759

While I think that Mr.Tepper's points about the value of having an
accessible, "standard" bus are quite correct, I think it may be hasty
to blame Apple overmuch for the decision.

Apple made a machine with slots long before they made the Mac, the
II series.  It gave them incredible headaches because people would
buy discount interface cards, or even premium quality cards and then
discover that their favorite software wouldn't run (I for instance
could not use both an ALS Dispatcher serial card and Softech
UCSD p-System simultaneously, without significant patches to the 
p-System).  Jobs apparently hated this problem and his decisions on the
Mac reflect it.  The Mac is supposed to be easy to use, complex
interactions between cards, OS, and software are not a feature of an
easy to use machine.  So . . . the Mac has a complex set of requirements
for how software is supposed to work that should make software independent
of machine version and the machine is closed.

The result has been difficulty penetrating the corporate market and years
of poor hard disk performance (serial ports are slow).  However, because
almost all commercial software adheres to the standards set by Apple and
because some of it is very good, it is very difficult to successfully 
market software that does not adhere to the standards.  This might
not have been the case if the Mac had been open from the start.  Also,
since it has been impossible to add an 8086 card, the Mac has had to viewed
as standing apart from the Clone Crowd.  Is this good? Is this bad?
Ask me or John Sculley in five-ten years.

Ethan Munson
UCB CS Grad Student
munson@ernie.berkeley.edu

In article <203@druil.UUCP>, lat@druil.UUCP (TepperL) writes:
> John's point about getting new technology faster is well taken.
> Just consider what might have happened had the original Mac been
> designed using the Multibus: instant Ethernet, instant hard disks,
> instant streaming tape.  You could've put a Fujitsu Eagle on a Mac
> if you had the money.  There have been 1024 x 1024 x 8-bit, full color
> image processing boards available for the Multibus for several years
> now.  
> 
> It's my belief that a Mac with a Multibus would have buried the IBM PC,
> rather than giving it some stiff competition like the real Mac did.

I won't argue the dis/advantages of the antiquated Multibus.

But there is a good reason why Multibus Mac would not have done well
against the IBM PC.

Can you say 'too expensive'?

Slots are not cheap; they require additional gold and power supply and
cabinet.  And I'm sure anyone in business will tell you that the cost
of parts and assembly gets rolled up 4-10 times before it reaches dealer
retail.

More significantly, the cost and size of boards for Multibus are probably
not suitable for the Mac.  (Note the previous posting which pointed out
that Apple has proposed microcomputer-sized NuBus cards.)  It wouldn't
be the same size, and it wouldn't be the same cost.

I'd say offhand, the two things Apple could have included with the 
original Mac to improve sales were:

	1. Provide socketed memory or empty sockets, with built-in
	   jumpers for higher-density chips.
	2. Provide an external port for high-speed peripherals, e.g. SCSI.
	   thus allow hard disks for business use.

They call this the Macintosh Plus, and it's outselling the 512e by about
3:1.

A lot of us like to second guess major companies; it's easy to do, since
most people on the net have never run one.  My inclination would be to
examine how a strategy could have been fine-tuned, since major companies
will tend to make their big decisions based on ego (Jobs) or sheer
weight of bureaucracy.

-- 
	Joel West			     MCI Mail: 282-8879
	Western Software Technology, POB 2733, Vista, CA  92083
	{cbosgd, ihnp4, pyramid, sdcsvax, ucla-cs} !gould9!joel
	joel%gould9.uucp@NOSC.ARPA

(sacrificial lamb line)

    While I can't say one way or another what kind of bus the new Mac
will use, I will put in my own two cents about VMEbus:

    I have been writing software for VMEbus based 68000/68020
systems for about three years now. All of this software has been
related in some form or another to image processing. After using
the VMEbus for such an extended period of time, I have two points
to make in favor of NuBus.

	A: VMEbus is still too slow for many image processing
	and other IO and/or memory intensive applications. Every
	application I have worked on has been VMEbus limited.
	On a 68020, adding memory on a VMEbus board exacts
	a severe performance penalty (4 or more wait states).
	Even using a fast memory bus like VMX32 doesn't give
	you access to 0 wait state memory. The NuBus, which
	is about 3x faster than VME, will make a large difference.

	B: Existing VMEBus cards will not be cheaper than the
	new cards that Apple and new third party developers
	will bring out, regardless of which bus Apple uses.
	Even simple IO cards for VMEbus cost at least $1000
	currently (by simple I mean a 4x8 parallel board with
	no onboard intelligence). Smart VMEbus boards like disk
	controllers typically cost $2000 or more. For a personal
	computer like Apple's, these prices are way out of line.
	Although I would expect the introduction of a mass
	market VMEbus computer to do wonders for VMEbus pricing,
	I don't expect that the small companies who make VMEbus
	boards today could compete with companies like Apple
	and AST when it comes to cutting manufacturing costs.

I think the second point is the more important one: no matter
which "high performance" bus Apple chooses, they will be forced
to do everything from scratch. So why not pick the bus which
has the better bandwidth, so that the machine will be as good
as it can possibly be?

I vote for NuBus (or FutureBus).

Andrew Shebanow
bus wierdo at large.

Its a hard call to make, but if the Mac had been open in the beginning, would
it have retained its essence?  Multibus boards were made by OEMs for system
integrators, not end users.  Multibus boards are large and potentially would
intimidate the users, as well as make the systems larger (definitely not Mac).
Granted, I was no friend or supporter of Apples until they chose to survive
by removing Steve Jobs, but the original vision of the Mac as the "computer for
the rest of the world" was an important one to establish.  Now it can expand.

> NuBus, along with Multibus II and Futurebus, can all be classified as
> modern, full feature buses, while VMEbus is a wide Multibus with an improved
> electrical environment.

Personally, I don't *want* a "full feature" bus!  I want something simple
and fast which doesn't make me use half the board (or expensive single-sourced
slow-delivery buggy semi-vaporware VVVLSI) for bus interfaces.  It looks to
me like the bus-design community is going through a delayed version of the
processor-architecture community's evolution.  The "full feature" buses are
the Intel 432 of bus design.  It's high time for a RISC bus.

(I may be being a bit hard on the NuBus; as I recall, it's not as bad as
the rest.  Multibus II and Futurebus are definitely 432buses, and VMEbus
avoids that distinction only if you ignore the more recent tailfins.)
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry

> Its a hard call to make, but if the Mac had been open in the beginning, would
> it have retained its essence? 

Even more important:  If the original Mac had been open, would anyone have
bought it?  remember that an open bus adds a LOT of complexity to a system,
since you can't put everything on a single board anymore -- you have added
costs for a larger power supply, a backplane, for FCC RF interference 
reductions, for all sorts of things.

If the Mac had come out at $5,000 each, with 128K in it and no software,
would YOU have bought it? Would all of the other people who did buy the Mac
buy it at double the cost?

If the Lisa is any indication, the answer it obvious...

Organization : Calfornia Institute of Technology
Keywords: 
From: woody@tybalt.caltech.edu (William Edward Woody)
Path: tybalt.caltech.edu!woody

In article <8980@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.uucp (Chuq Von Rospach; Lord of the OtherRealms) writes:
>> Its a hard call to make, but if the Mac had been open in the beginning, would
>> it have retained its essence? 
>
>Even more important:  If the original Mac had been open, would anyone have
>bought it?  remember that an open bus adds a LOT of complexity to a system,
>since you can't put everything on a single board anymore -- you have added
>costs for a larger power supply, a backplane, for FCC RF interference 
>reductions, for all sorts of things.
>
>If the Mac had come out at $5,000 each, with 128K in it and no software,
>would YOU have bought it? Would all of the other people who did buy the Mac
>buy it at double the cost?
>
>If the Lisa is any indication, the answer it obvious...


If the Apple II, IIe, etc., is any indication, the answer is not so
obvious.  If you are willing to change the size and shape of the Mac,
and do the hardware addressing _right_, you would have had a B/W Amega
with a good operating system.

But I like my cute little Macintosh.  I hope the new Macintosh 2 (comming
Real Soon Now...) doesn't become as large and klunky as an IBM AT...

- William Woody                          Mac! > ][n && /|\ 
  woody@romeo.caltech.edu

In article <7288@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> NuBus, along with Multibus II and Futurebus, can all be classified as
>> modern, full feature buses, while VMEbus is a wide Multibus with an improved
>
Where can I get a the current futurebus and NuBus "work" standards.
I have only an old futurebus concept. Are there differences between
the TI-NuBus and MIT-Nubus?

henk peek    henkp@nikhefk.UUCP    seismo!mcvax!nikhefk!henkp.UUCP

The genesis of the Mac's closed-box philosophy can be traced back to an
Apple internal paper, published a few years ago in one of the ACM SIG
publications, titled something like "Making a million computers a year".
A fascinating paper; the problems of producing computers in that kind of
volume are mind-boggling.  (For example, if you keep a one-month inventory
of $2000 computers, that's $166 MILLION dollars tied up in inventory alone!)
Harbingers of the Mac are all through that paper.  The closed-box approach
comes from two considerations:  (1) the people who will buy computers at
that kind of production volume ("the rest of us") want one-piece turnkey
hardware that does not need assembly or configuring; (2) maintenance and
support for that many computers is a horrible nightmare unless the
configuration is utterly standardized.

Seen in this light, the shift to a slotted Mac is *not* the correction of
a technical mistake; the original technical reasoning was correct.  The
mistake was in marketing, to wit the assumption of selling truly vast
numbers of computers to unsophisticated customers.  Given more modest
sales to generally more knowledgeable customers, the closed-box philosophy
is less appropriate.  (Actually, I think the closed-box Mac could still
have been a conspicuous success if it had had (a) more memory, (b) either
a built-in hard disk or a straightforward way of attaching fast mass-storage
peripherals [e.g. SCSI], and perhaps (c) memory-management hardware to blur
the limits of physical memory.  Apple's biggest mistake was not the closed
box, but a closed box that didn't have quite enough inside it.)
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry