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To: Boplicity who wrote (1974)9/10/1997 6:21:00 PM
From: Allen Benn   of 10309
 
>Why does a BIOS company have to go through WIND for emulation library?

Sorry for the miscommunication. I didn't mean to suggest they would need to. I2O is an open standard, so just about anybody is free to code their own emulation library of routines. In particular, WIND could decide to do it themselves, but I doubt if they would be interested. On the other hand, it is a natural for BIOS companies.

I see BIOS companies now having to support two flavors of I/O drivers: legacy and I2O. That means they need to add the I2O flavor for existing peripherals, where they already have legacy software so they can take advantage of I2O. That is what they are probably spending nights doing now.

But what happens in the future when new devices come along, and device software is needed for them? Why write and test two flavors of software, especially when testing the legacy approach is made difficult and expensive trying to cope with potential incompatibility problems with other devices that may or may not be connected to a computer. An alternative is to write only the I2O flavor, and include I2O emulation software that will enable the device(s) to execute properly in all computers, including those that lack I2O. Since the emulated I2O need only support the device(s) in question, probably only a subset of I2O need be implemented by the BIOS company.

Allen
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