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flux@microsoft.com |
| Douglas Boling |
| The Great Wire Hope |
USB was developed by a coalition of PC industry titans (including IBM, Intel, Microsoft®, NEC, and Compaq) in alliance with Northern Telecom. The former DEC, now Compaq, was also in the original group. Whatever the original problem USB was
The USB advocates talk of USB keyboards and mice, scanners, monitors, and—of all things—speakers that could also use this next great standard. The problem is that there isn't a keyboard out there that's not working just fine with the PS/2 keyboard interface developed by IBM in 1986. It's the same with the mouse; current mice work just fine with the PS/2 mouse port. The only product I've seen that makes an argument for USB is the Feel-It mouse I wrote about a few months ago. (It's the cool feedback mouse that needs the bandwidth of USB to provide realistic feedback information.) The same solution-in-search-of-a-problem approach also applies to monitors and speakers. A few years ago, you could argue that monitors needed a control channel from the PC to control the monitor, including power down, contrast, brightness, and so forth. Sending crude control signals across the video out lines solved the power down problem. PC monitors these days wake up at the shake of a mouse, just like Kevin Costner's Lisa did in that old Apple commercial. The brightness and contrast in monitors are now controlled using a cheap, onboard microcontroller. A USB port could offload the intelligence from the monitor to the CPU, but that just means that monitor manufacturers will have to supply a control panel applet for Windows® 98, Windows NT®, and any other operating system running on the PC. The monitor will still have to support those hundreds of millions of installed PCs not running Windows 98 or Windows NT 5.0. It also means yet another install/remove adventure with a peripheral that works just fine without such efforts. They call this progress? And what about speakers? Does everything have to be digital? Good old analog-signals-down-cheap-speaker-wire provides enough fidelity for PC speakers. Audiophiles, with state-of-the-art speakers, simply buy better quality speaker wire to maintain fidelity. So, why push digital sound out to speakers attached to a PC? Scanners are perhaps a place where the relatively high bandwidth and plug and play aspects of USB help the user. Scanners today are stuck on bidirectional parallel ports and SCSI ports, which are not primarily used for scanning. But are scanners the killer peripheral that will drive acceptance of USB? Doubtful. Of course, USB has one foot already in the door whether you know it or want it. All Intel motherboards as well as Intel chipsets for Pentiums and Pentium IIs have USB ports these days. If you have a Pentium or Pentium II machine, it probably has two USB ports on the motherboard—even if they're not brought out to connectors on the back of the PC chassis. It makes me wonder when Intel, which now controls all the Pentium II chipset designs, will pull PS/2 keyboard and mouse support. This is the problem I have with USB: it isn't what USB might be able to do, but what it might screw up. My keyboard works fine. So does my monitor. Don't start moving hardware designs away from these simple, proven, and quite adequate technologies to an overly complex, generic interface that I don't need. Today my PC has PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports; please leave them there. The same goes for my monitor; it works great without a driver, so leave it alone! Where will USB take hold? Perhaps our friend the Internet might be able to help. Today's modems are currently throttled to 115 Kbps, the high-end speed of a standard 16550 serial port. ISDN "modems" and other high-speed data access hardware need a bigger pipe into the PC. One way is to provide an ISA or PCI card, but that's a somewhat messy installation. Instead, a high-speed serial data port on a PC that users could plug their ASDL boxes into would be nice. Hey, maybe Northern Telecom, a telephony company in the original USB consortium, had the best idea after all. 
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