Editing QuickRing (section)

== History ==

QuickRing started as an offshoot of the fabled [[Futurebus]] project, which started in the late 1970s under the aegis of the [[IEEE]]. The Futurebus process quickly bogged down, and concluding it was doomed, several of the main designers left the effort in 1987 to try again on smaller projects, leading to both QuickRing and [[Scalable Coherent Interconnect|SCI]].<ref>[http://www.scizzl.com/HPCwireDBGinterview.html Questions about SCI]</ref> In the case of QuickRing the main proponent was Paul Sweazey of [[National Semiconductor]], who had hosted Futurebus's [[cache coherency]] group. Sweazey left National Semiconductor and moved to [[Apple Computer]]'s Advanced Technology Group, where the new system was developed.

The system was first announced publicly at the 1992 [[Worldwide Developers Conference]], positioned primarily as a secondary bus for computer systems to carry multiple streams of [[digital video]] without using the existing [[backplane]] bus.<ref name=enews>[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n1912_v38/ai_12191720 Apple introduces 1.5 Gbyte/s Mac QuickRing bus in step toward advanced net, multimedia use]{{dead link|date=May 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}, Electronic News, May 18, 1992</ref> Apple was particularly interested in this role due to the limitations of their current [[NuBus]] systems in terms of speed. They envisioned various video cards using a second connector located near the top of the card, opposite the NuBus connector on the bottom, to talk to each other. Optionally, one of the cards would produce compressed output, which could be sent over the NuBus for storage or display. Before any commercial use of QuickRing, newer versions of [[Peripheral Component Interconnect|PCI]] started appearing that offered performance close enough to QuickRing to make its role redundant. Apple switched to an all-PCI based computer lineup starting in 1995, and in one of their general downsizings in the early 90s, Apple dropped their funding for QuickRing.

Sweazey moved back to National Semiconductor, who positioned QuickRing as a high-speed interconnect. Here it had little better luck, competing against SCI on one hand, and ever-faster versions of [[Ethernet]] on the other. Efforts were made to standardize QuickRing inside the existing [[VMEbus]] system using some redundant pins in response to an industry effort to standardize parallel processing hardware, but nothing ever came of this. The [[US Navy]] announced several tenders for QuickRing products for [[sonar]] data processing (for which they had originally had Futurebus+ developed), but it is unclear whether or not it was actually used in this role. National eventually lost interest, and the system essentially disappeared in 1996. Similar products, notably [[SKYconnect]] and Raceway, were also standardized in this role, but seem to have seen little use as well.