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Re[2]: [OM] OT: Lordly Companies and mass-ware

Subject: Re[2]: [OM] OT: Lordly Companies and mass-ware
From: Dave Haynie <dhaynie@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 15:02:20 -0500 (EST)
On Tue, 5 Jan 1999 08:40:50 -0800, Jan Steinman <jans@xxxxxxxxxxx> jammed all 
night, and by sunrise was overheard remarking:

> >From: Matthias Wilke <Matthias.K.Wilke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> >>I really hate to do this...but M$ has invested $150 million in Apple
> >>Computers.

> >That may be the reason, that the best selling iMac has USB (Microsoft's
> >child) rather than FireWire (Apple's and Sony's child).
 
> Actually, USB and FireWire are totally different beasts. USB is to serial
> and parallel ports as FireWire is to SCSI or EIDE ports. USB is cheap and
> relatively slow, albeit MUCH faster than the serial ports it replaces.
> FireWire is fairly expensive, and super-fast.

Super-fast, currently, is something of an overstatement for Firewire.
Yes, it is fast -- current implementations range from 100Mb/s to
400Mb/s. Today, the fastest  EIDE runs at about  528Mb/s, and the
fastest common SCSI runs at 640Mb/s (there's another doubling of SCSI
speed in the works as we speak, it'll probably be called Ultra3 SCSI
once it's out in force). 

> I think it's a fitting irony that MicroSoft and Intel have been pushing USB
> for years, with little attention from the industry,

Actually, they haven't. Intel has, indeed, been pusing USB for years;
they put it into system chips long ago, and it's been commonly available
as a port on new PCs since the ATX form factor started to catch on about
two year ago. Before that, it was actually available on most PCs, but
you had to add a cable to a header on the motherboard, and most
companies didn't (the header was there, of course, because most
companies buy their motherboards from Intel). 

Microsoft hasn't really been pushing USB at all until recently. They
added lip server support to it in '97, with the release of Windows 95
OSR2.1 (sometimes called Windows 95C), which allowed manufacturers to
ship USB keyboards, mice, and other simple things. But it wasn't fully
supported until last spring, when Windows 98 was released. Even at that,
it beat the iMac to the market.

> but it took Apple to bring it to the masses. Before the iMac, you
> couldn't buy a computer pre-configured with USB

Of course you could. I have one year, three years old, that came with
USB pre-configured. Of course, Windows didn't do much with it, but the
BIOS at least could emulate a PS/2 keyboard if you wanted it to. 

What the iMac did is force the issue. And that's a good thing. It was
fairly easy for companies to believe that PC users would still buy
serial or parallel port things, versus USB, especially when Windows
didn't work with USB very well. It was a whole different thing when the
iMac, certainly the most consumer-interesting computer to come along in
a long time (surprising what a little transparent blue plastic, a 3-5
year pent-up demand for a "consumer Mac", and the retro-cute movement
started by Volkswagon does to an industry), and USB-only. Which, in fact,
is what Microsoft started pusing last June at their WinHEC conference (
again, before the iMac shipped, USB, by MS dictate, is supposed to
replace the ISA bus. They said the same thing at WinHEC '97, but no one
listened, since they hadn't really said what replaces the ISA bus).
Take something between the Windows 98 release and the iMac release, add
the prerequisitie 6-9 months for a new product release, and it makes
sense to believe we're on the edge of a flood of USB peripherals. Apple
had a hand in it, but they don't get all the credit. 

> -- you had to add a card, with the attendant hassles 

Actually, add-in USB cards for the PCI bus are relatively late in coming,
since before Windows 98, there was virtually no market for them. Intel's
support of USB on the motherboard was free, and if you don't buy the
notion of Intel's benevolence in trying simply to improve the breed with
USB, then you will by the notion of Intel hoping to sell millions of
tiny microcontrollers with USB ports built-in, for use in mice,
keyboards, ZIP drives, etc. 

> Now there are
> super-floppies, interface converters, scanners, all coming out with USB and
> iMac support.

Again, by now, they would be here anyway. Perhaps not in quite the same
number, that's impossible to say. The existance of the iMac did one
thing: it made it stupid not to ship MacOS drivers with any new USB
peripheral. Which, oddly enough, had done more to mainstream the Mac any
anything in years, even Apple's conversion to the PCI bus in '92. So it
was a good thing. 

On a photo-if-not-Olympus-specific note, USB is useful for scanners (
SCSI is technically better, for speed, but USB will be more hassle free,
since it doesn't have the "bus treatment" aspects that seem to confuse
novices and makes every vendor ship a dumbed down SCSI card to help
themselves avoid support calls). Now, you may say, I already have a
scanner -- maybe true, but if you're serious about digital photography,
you'll eventually have at least two, one for film/slides, one for
prints. And as far as digital cameras goes, USB is nearly perfect; much
faster and more reliable than the serial ports in use today, hot-plug
capable, etc. 

Now if only we could get a digital camera back for the OM-series. With
USB port, of course. 
--
Dave Haynie  | V.P. Technology, Met@box Infonet, AG |  http://www.metabox.de
Be Dev #2024 | NB851 Powered! | Amiga 2000, 3000, 4000, PIOS One



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