Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
become the standard way to transfer large amounts of data.
2.
MCA bus
. IBM tried to pull the standard for bus technology back to a closed system
with the MCA bus. It failed as it came up against the technologically inferior ISA, as
the ISA bus was an open standard.
3.
VME bus
. Powerful, complex and very misunderstood. Avoid in the same way that
you would avoid the plague. The designers decided to create a bus that had every-
thing, all that's lacking is kitchen sink.
4.
RS-232 port
. Another bus, along with the ISA bus, which manages to get into the Top
5 busses of all-time, and also into the relegation zone. It is an extremely useful bus,
but suffers because of a lack of speed and its incompatibility (even although everyone
is working to the same standard, the level of implementation of the standard varies).
5.
Keyboard connection/serial port mouse connection
. Two extremely limited connec-
tors. The keyboard connector has virtually no intelligence built into it, and provides
for limited sensing of the keyboard type, or extra functionality. Its only real advantage
is that it looks so different from other connectors. Another advantage is that is has al-
lowed the integration of the new PS/2-type mouse connector. Serial port mouse con-
nections have always caused problems, mainly because the use up one of the serial
port connection.
Well that's the bus awards. As we still have half a page to complete, here's the winners of
the specialist technologies:
•
Local Area Networking bus award
:
1.
Ethernet (one horse race). Although ISDN deserves a mention.
•
Wide Area Networking bus award
:
1.
ATM. A proper networking technology that integrates real-time signals (such as
speech) and non-real-time data (such as computer data) into a networking tech-
nology.
2.
Gigabit Ethernet. Uses standard Ethernet technology to gives an extremely fast
transfer rate, but still suffers from the problems of the original Ethernet specifica-
tion.
3.
FDDI. A reliable ring-based networking technology that allows for the transmis-
sion of data over a large geographical area.
•
Instrumentation bus award
:
1.
RS-422. An excellent bus which allows multiple attachments to a single bus, and
up to 1Mbps.
2.
IEEE-488. An easy-to-use, robust, widely used, standardised and easy-to-connect-
to bus, which is rather limited, but extremely useful.
3.
CAN bus. An excellent multi-drop system, for closely connected devices, especially
in automobile applications. It overcomes some of the problems that Ethernet has,
as devices are so closely connected.
•
Interconnecting protocol award
.
1.
TCP/IP (one horse race).
