A twenty-foot-long computer
Back in the days of Windows 95, when
Plug and Play was in its infancy,
one of the things the Plug and Play team
did was push the PCI specification to an
absurd extreme.
They took a computer and put it at one end of a hallway.
They then built a chain of PCI bridge cards that ran down
the hallway, and at the end of the chain, plugged in a video card.
And then they turned it on.
Amazingly, it actually worked.
The machine booted and used a video
card twenty feet away. (I'm guessing at the distance.
It was a long time ago.)
It took two people to operate this computer,
one to move the mouse and type, and another to
watch the monitor at the other end and report where the pointer was
and what was happening on the screen.
And the latency was insane.
But it did work and thereby validated the original design.
Other Plug and Play trivia:
The phrase "Plug and Play" had already been trademarked at the
time, and Microsoft had to obtain the rights to the phrase
from the original owners.
