Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!a.cs.uiuc.edu!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: GATHER and say NO to MCA!
Message-ID: <45900140@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 2 Jul 88 14:46:00 GMT
References: <978@gethen.UUCP>
Lines: 14
Nf-ID: #R:gethen.UUCP:978:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:45900140:000:692
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald    Jul  2 09:46:00 1988


>Imagine an end user even adding their own printer 
>port to a computer 10 years ago! It wasn't fun.
I don't understand this remark! What do you mean by "fun"? I added
ports to my PDP-11's 10 years ago and to my PDP-8 20 years ago. I had
two choices: I could buy a card from DEC and stuff it in the 11, or
I could build my own from the complete bus description in the 
"PDP-11 handbook". Plugging in was too trivial to be fun, building
my own WAS fun - easy, too, since I like playing with hardware.
I honestly don't remember about printer ports for the 8, but I built
a multichannel scaler for one. That was lots of little cards, tied
together with 2086 wire-wrapped wires.

Doug McDonald