In the PC world, it became a pathological issue that lead to the "Plug
and Pray" initiative, which failed because
of the need to register your devices with a central authority and there
was BIOS level database issues.
The final solution for PCs was the PCI spec which allowed the BIOS and
hardware to sort out the port, interrupt
and DMA requirements.
S100 being part of the First Cause of micro-computing still requires
manual integration and anything we can
do to streamline (and make understandable) that process is helpful.
Boards with fixed (unconfigurable) I/O, interrupt, or DMA requirements
become fixtures around which other
boards must be configured, and in the case of an unresolvable conflict,
hard decisions must be made about
board combinations that cannot be used.
Douglas