[Coco] Re: The evolution of the Coco..

[John E. Malmberg]

Nickolas Marentes wrote:
> 
>>>STEVE BJORK
>>>2) Only one model of motherboard could be use.  I'm assuming your are not
>>>going to rewrite the BIOS for every motherboard Chip Set out there.  What
>>>happen when the version 2 of the motherboard comes or they some making
>>>it?  The life span of a motherboard is less than a year these days.
>  
> One could buy 100 mainboards and effectively "lock" the platform. I doubt
> you'd ever be able to sell more than this.

Having watched one support organization try this in order to simplify 
spares maintenance, I would not count on that one working.

In a batch of allegedly 500 identical motherboards there were several 
manufacturing changes that were incompatible at many levels.

It took two months of pushing at high levels to get one of the suppliers 
to the motherboard to admit to changing out the video chip to a new 
generation with out notifying the motherboard manufacturer.

It was noticed because the new video chip needed newer drivers which the 
chip set manufacturer only released two months after the hardware was in 
the field.  Otherwise you were restricted to the low end VGA/EGA/CGA modes.

This affected about 50 percent of the lot.

A number of the motherboard BIOSes did not respond properly to the 
CTRL-ALT-DELETE sequence.  That affected about 25 percent of the lot.

Later testing showed that a number of the motherboards could not run at 
their rated speed if you put a stress test on them.  I do not know how 
much of the lot was affected by that.

You might be surprised at stuff that is in the BIOS and drivers that is 
only there to work around hardware bugs that were discovered late in 
manufacturing.

There are IO chipsets out there that drop interrupts or do other bad 
things like overrun DMA.

For the average user, if you get one of these lemon chipsets and notice 
it immediately, you can usually get the seller to swap it out.  But 
there may be thousands of users that may be perfectly happy living with 
that defect because they do not stress their machine enough to notice.

When you make a bulk buy with the intent of selling the stuff over time, 
what do you do when you find out a year after you bought your stock that 
there is a problem with a number of them that can not be worked around?

-John
wb8tyw(at)qsl.net
Personal Opinion Only