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Well there are JVMs implemented in hardware and JVMs with real time RTSJ support (e.g. Websphere Realtime. I suppose it's also possible that some parts of the system are Java and some aren't and I wouldn't really know what the LSE does without looking.

I know when I worked for a financial house that it was a mix of code. C++ / .NET represented the thick client code. Java represented the web UI and middleware, in the back you might have mainframe views all tied together with b2b XML or webservices. So when you filled a trade ticket you might do it through C++ or Java, which would be sent as XML to middleware which would dump it in a mainframe view. Later on you might get a acknowledgement of the trade through a stream which would also supply streaming quote data and other realtime info.

Much of the infrastructure that did realtime quotes and research functionality for the consumer facing services was actually perl scripts running against a module in a web server. Sounds weird but the module kicked off a bunch of slave threads and a pile of shared memory and basically listened to a streaming service. The perl script was precompiled so it could be invoked rapidly and instantly spew out XML containing the latest quote data.

Yes it was messy but indicative of an organic growing system.

In summary trading systems are not easy. But moving to an open source OS at least opens up the choices you have for hardware and whatnot. What you run over the top is obviously going to have it's own performance impacts so the OS alone is not the only factor.

I think it's a little more robust than that. I'd suggest making one of the categories "Indian tribes native to South America"

does IBM even have an 8 socket intel chassis?

It looks like thier ex5 series of servers can support up to 8 sockets.

Really?

Show me how Google or Bing returns EXACTLY "What is Cooperstown?" from "It figures that the writer of 'The Last of the Mohicans' died in this town".

I get a bunch pages and text *I* have to page through that *I* have to deduce the question from. I must have missed the Bing or Google Jeopardy engines that precisely return Jeopardy formed answers as Watson can.

IBM's Watson will answer "It figures that the write of 'The Last of the Mohicans' died in this town" with "What is Cooperstown?" not a mess of unparsed pages that you the user have to sift through and use your own brain to make sense of.

Moreover, Watson will know how to pronounce these questions correctly and can deduce the sex of "James Fenimore Cooper" along the way.

Watson kicks Google and Bing ass.

Really?

Show me how Google or Bing returns EXACTLY "What is Cooperstown?" from "It figures that the writer of 'The Last of the Mohicans' died in this town".

I get a bunch pages and text *I* have to page through that *I* have to deduce the question from. I must have missed the Bing or Google Jeopardy engines that precisely return Jeopardy formed answers as Watson can.

IBM's Watson will answer "It figures that the write of 'The Last of the Mohicans' died in this town" with "What is Cooperstown?" not a mess of unparsed pages that you the user have to sift through and use your own brain to make sense of.

Moreover, Watson will know how to pronounce these questions correctly and can deduce the sex of "James Fenimore Cooper" along the way.

Watson kicks Google and Bing ass.

> Which means 32nm Intel chips battle 42nm ARM ones.

No. Intel will battle 32nm and 28nm ARM.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/31886.wss

It is a special tournament, like the celebrity/teen/college tournaments. Whoever has the most money after three days gets a million dollars, 2nd place gets $300,000 and third places gets $200,000. IBM will donate all it's winnings to charity (World Vision and World Community Grid), and the other two contestants have said they will donate 50% of their winnings to charities. See http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33373.wss

Lame article... which is really just a reprint of photos from IBM Storage Archives site.

I bet the author's email to IBM asking permission to use the photos went something like this:

Dear IBM Archives Group:

I am an author at MacWorld and I have no more ideas for what to write about since bloggers have better sources on the iPhone/iPad/iPod/iOS than I. I'm in desperate need of source material and I came across your archives website. Since most of my readers thought storage was build by Apple, I'd like to show them that you guys have been making storage since before Apple was around and most of my readers were born. Can I just copy a bunch of your pics and make a slideshow out of them? My editor will kill me if I don't. By the way, I was a OS/2 user back in the early 90s and my mother used an IBM selectric typewriter in college.

Here is a press release from a couple of years ago basically trumpeting the same thing. I think it is policy to recycle this every so often to prop up their stock price.

Exactly! It's the new "racetrack PR" where the same press release is continuously circulated and re-published every few quarters.

Here is a press release from a couple of years ago basically trumpeting the same thing. I think it is policy to recycle this every so often to prop up their stock price.

You do have a valid point, the weekly view says it has been rising steadily since monday, but more than likely they made this "breakthrough" earlier and decided when to spit it as the stocks bottomed on a certain threshold. Just because the announcement was strategically planned does not mean that the breakthrough is any less real though.

In a paper published in the Dec. 24 issue of Science Magazine, the IBM researchers report that domain walls have mass and do indeed take a bit of time to speed up to peak velocity, and to slow down. Knowing this, they'll be able to move and retrieve data on a racetrack trip accurately. There's still a lot of work to be done before racetrack becomes a reality, but according to Parkin, the biggest questions -- whether an electric charge would move these domain walls, and whether or not they have mass -- have now been answered. Now the problems are more practical and less theoretical: how do you build a racetrack chip that works reliably with millions or even billions of these racetracks, for example. "Those are the questions that we can only address by building prototypes and testing them for a period of time," Parkin said.

And the official IBM press release:
https://www-304.ibm.com/jct03001c/press/us/en/pressrelease/33291.wss


I see more data center utilization for this technology rather than consumer devices. Be nice if I could get a home NAS on one of these in 5-10 years.

Here is a press release from a couple of years ago basically trumpeting the same thing. I think it is policy to recycle this every so often to prop up their stock price.

According to the RIAA:

Digital revenues have grown from nearly $200 million in '04 to $2.3 billion in '07 (estimates for '08 - $3 billion), accounting for 25 percent of all retail value revenue (upwards of 30 percent at end of '08).

That gives us a 2008 estimate of 12 billion dollars in revenue for retail sale of music. Presumably for the RIAA, who "create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States". So a total of about $14.2 billion in revenue.

Now, obviously we also need to take the MPAA into consideration. Again, using 2008 numbers:
Ticket sales grossed about $10 billion. And since quite a lot of people seem to claim (and no, I have no source handy) that home video sales is about the same as ticket sales, then we're looking at around $20 billion in 2008.

Apple's revenue for 2008 in the Americas was $14.5 billion. Granted, that's a larger geographical area than RIAA's numbers, but then again Apple is a relatively small company in the IT landscape.

How about some of the bigger fish?

IBM reported revenue of $103.6 billion, and pre-tax profit of $16.7 billion.

So, the movie and music industry combined gets up to around $35 billion in 2008 in the US.

IBM (world wide) - $103 billion
Apple (Americas) - $14.5 billion
Google (world wide) - $21.8 billion
Microsoft (world wide?) - $60.4 billion
Oracle (world wide?) - 22.4 billion
Dell (world wide?) - 61 billion

Seriously - why the fuck are the IT giants just turning their back on the complete and utter gang rape on things like the Internet, when most of their products would die off the moment it stops working the way it should.

Just buy out the fuckers, boot the executives, lawyers, assistants etc. from their penthouse offices (literally boot them out over the balcony) and just kill off these massively debilitating parasites.

There is that, but equally for applications that require no magnetic field, things that are hot have lots of energy. Energetic particles bouncing around everywhere couple to your meticulously-set-up experiment to the environment, destroying your isolated system and removing the quantum effects you're utilizing.

For quantum computing, one of the requirements specified by the di Vincenzo criteria are long decoherence times. Heat seriously reduces those.

They recently published this. It's about cooling with relatively hot water (60 degrees Centigrade/140F). They probably researched this because the water is cheaper to cool by air when it's hotter.
Also in 2008 they published this, a solution to cool inside stacked dies.

"How can you find all these answers without being connected to the Internet?
Watson will not have enough data to answer every possible Jeopardy! question in its self-contained memory, nor can it possibly predict the questions it will get. In this sense it has the same limitations as do the best human contestants. The entire Watson computer system will be self-contained and on stage as are the human contestants – no external connections, no life-lines – what you see is what you get. The purpose of this technology showcase is to demonstrate the system's ability to deeply analyze the data it does have and to compute accurate confidences based on supporting or refuting natural language evidence. Think of it as if Watson has read a lot of books and in real time relates what it read to the question to find and support the right answers."

http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa/faq.shtml

Since 2003 they have been gumming up the USPTO as well. Note that they've filed thousands of patent applications.

And it has paid application fees, search fees, and examination fees on every one of them. The Patent Office is entirely supported by fees. IV isn't "gumming up the Patent Office." In a sense that's not even possible. As long as a decent number of the applications issue as patents and IV pays maintenance fees on them, then they're fully paying their own way.

And it's still small potatoes compared to the top ten patent filers, particularly IBM, which received 4,186 patents in 2008 alone, suggesting that it files about that many each year.

The internet isn't really a place to gain an informed opinion over things.

Yes, you are correct. Opinions should all be tossed out. Pure info is what the Internet is all about. Pick a language and a FOSS project, develop away, it's a great learning process that I've found much more "educational" than formal education.

Teach yourself C++: C++ Annotations, C++ Language Tutorial... ... or Perl: Perl programming documentation, or JavaScript,
or Java.

Just search the web, you'll find everything that any professor will ever be able to teach you online. Need guidance, clarification, or to ask a question? There are free online forums for that too... Yes, the Internet on average, much like the FM band, has more signal than noise, but similarly you can easily tune your into the signal you need.

Consider this: My Java "professor" gave an assignment where we read in rows of data from standard input, and output the table sorted by a certain column's value. He offered extra credit for proper alignment and justification of the table's cells... "WTF? Really?", I thought.

I used the Collections framework along with Swing to provide a GUI w/ sortable & justified JTable columns instead of doing character counting and sending extra spaces with the text to the standard output. He gave me a C. Another student used the Formatter to provide printf style formatting... also got a C, WTF! Go beyond the prof's teachings & expectations to meet a requirement, get a poor grade... That's dumb and counter productive.

In the real world, you try not to re-invent the wheel, this college course was not teaching practical programming; It was so far beneath what I learned already online, on Java's own website, I dropped the course (waste of time). Sure I can write a merge sort, or programatically align console text output, but that was not what the assignment said: "Provide a tabular output sorted by the 'Name' column." We learned merge sort 2 weeks prior, but the "professor" would not move on.

Not having a "degree" myself, I frequently answer questions that "Degree" holding graduates ask in online forums... Why? Because they didn't learn what they needed to know in their courses.

You would be hard pressed to find a programmer that doesn't have some form of documentation open in another window, screen, or context menu while coding. IMO, besides learning about algorithms and complexity, the language specs & online tutorials are all you really need. I find paper books pale in comparison to down-loadable, copy&paste-able free, online resources. Also note: As a programmer you will be expected to keep up to date with the ever changing languages you learn. All of these changes are easily accessible online too.

There's a lot of noise and very little quality signal to use and without having a degree to start with it's pretty much futile in terms of knowing what is and is not reliable information.

I call bullshit. See esp. the Java link above, your arguments are ill-informed, and reek of FUD. Search google for "java tutorial", or "$any_lang tutorial" and you get some pretty damn reliable, pure "signal" information about what you searched for.

Are you really arguing that Language specs & Tutorials from IBM, Microsoft, etc, and docs from a language's main website (such as http://perldoc.perl.org/

i cannot believe that IBM or other U.S. vendors instead of Sony would not have been capable of crafting such a system... quite telling, IMO

They have, almost 5 years ago, actually. You are simply uninformed, haven't been paying attention:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/19198.wss
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/qs22/index.html

And the IBM Cell blade has a Cell chip, the PowerXCell 8i, with 1 extra SPE, 5 times the double precision floating point performance, and with the Infiniband HCA, over 50 times faster network communications.

Where have you been these past 5 years? :-)

i cannot believe that IBM or other U.S. vendors instead of Sony would not have been capable of crafting such a system... quite telling, IMO

They have, almost 5 years ago, actually. You are simply uninformed, haven't been paying attention:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/19198.wss
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/qs22/index.html

And the IBM Cell blade has a Cell chip, the PowerXCell 8i, with 1 extra SPE, 5 times the double precision floating point performance, and with the Infiniband HCA, over 50 times faster network communications.

Where have you been these past 5 years? :-)

You lose reliability and speed of IO amongst other things. Start at about page 11 of http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246366.pdf

Correct. IBM itself has offerings to allow you to emulate a zSeries on a linux box for development purposes.

However, I must point out that the EU complaint is not about IBM objecting to companies that are running old stuff using Hercules. IBM is objecting to companies running the very latest z/OS on an emulation of IBM's latest hardware.

More information available at source.

IBM's press release is http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33115.wss

One interesting bit is that the new IBM technology can be produced on the front-end of a standard CMOS manufacturing line and requires no new or special tooling. With this approach, silicon transistors can share the same silicon layer with silicon nanophotonics devices. To make this approach possible, IBM researchers have developed a suite of integrated ultra-compact active and passive silicon nanophotonics devices that are all scaled down to the diffraction limit - the smallest size that dielectric optics can afford.

Very few studies of software as it is and as it runs.

Try http://www.research.ibm.com/people/n/nickmitchell/publications/lcsd2005.pdf to a paper called "Diary of a Datum" and http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1297046 to another paper called "The causes of bloat, the limits of health". Both describe studies of large running applications in situ.

Full disclosure - I work for IBM Research and these papers were by folks in my department.

IBM really is a good second, but nowhere near MS.

Not quite, MS has a LONG way to go to catch IBM.

Microsoft Lands Milestone 5,000th Patent
source (2006)

IBM's worldwide patent portfolio exceeds 40,000 active patents.
source

They didn't influence the industry with their force to USB. Sorry, I know that Mac users would like to think so but when you look at the history it is clear it made little to no difference. USB peripherals started launching almost right away because it was a good bus and Intel mandated it on all new motherboards.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec7.html

The adoption problem

USB, even after support for it was available in Windows, faced an adoption problem. Standard adoption is largely driven by network effects; the utility of a standard-compatible device comes from its ability to interoperate with other things compatible with the same standard. A standard is only useful to you if there are compatible devices and if there are a lot of them.

This creates a Catch-22 situation for adoption. If users lack USB ports or drivers, those users cannot buy a USB device. For vendors, that limits the market for USB devices and makes it more reasonable to develop peripherals for other ports (such as the once-ubiquitous serial and parallel ports, or the SCSI port if you also wanted to tap the Mac market).

Even if users would prefer a USB device, they would still be more willing to accept a non-USB device since it can be connected to their computer. Even if USB is a better, more desirable piece of technology, it may not be more marketable than the alternatives! The number of people who would buy a USB Webcam might be smaller than the number who would buy a serial Webcam -- and almost all of them could be persuaded to buy a serial one instead.

Enter the iMac.

The original "bondi blue" iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports without offering "legacy" ports. That's right -- no serial ports, no ADB. This changes the network effects. Before the iMac showed up, there were many millions of PC users who had no USB ports and perhaps a couple of million who had a USB port and also legacy ports. The biggest market in 1998 was in serial and parallel ports (or joystick ports, PS/2 ports, and so on) -- there was no reason to target the USB market. That would just restrict your audience.

The iMac presented a ready-made market of users who chose the Mac line for its graphics capability. In turn, the iMac offered a captive audience of users who would buy a USB peripheral but would not buy any other kind of peripheral. These users provided a market for USB peripherals that wasn't facing competition from other port choices. The result was a flood of USB devices in white-and-blue plastic. This was a crucial turning point that created a reason (tied to a proven system choice) to prefer USB to non-USB ports.

Once adoption was foist onto this substantial segment of users, the technical merits of the technology won out easily. USB's technical superiority (for most peripherals) to the conglomeration of a half-dozen different port types was unambiguous.

You might find my "PKI in a web page" useful. It doesn't require sending all certs to all browsers, just the one internal CA cert and includes step-by-step screenshots on how to do that. See https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/soma/entry/a_pki_in_a_web_page10?lang=en

Working Beyond Borders

Don't laugh but there's still a lot of old assembler code out there that many major corporations depend upon. With very few people under the age of 40 able to modify said programs anyone with the skill set is going to be in high demand.

Download a copy of the Principles of Operation manual from IBM's web site and take a gander at it. http://publibfi.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/dz9zr008.pdf

Are you saying that Websphere and Weblogic don't have any JSF dependencies?
The last time I looked, there were very significant Apache dependencies in both Weblogic and Websphere.

Lets take a look, specifically at JSF implementations.

Weblogic uses "Sun Microsystems JavaServer Faces Implementation" 1.2-b20-FCS - or 1_2_03-rc2. (Source)

Websphere 7 has the option of two JSF implementations. The default is "Sun Reference Implementation 1.2." The other option is Apache MyFaces 1.2. (Source)

Sounds to me like the reference implementation of JSF 1.2 is the preferred version in these two products!

Even Jetty will have some Apache stuff in its pom.xml, won't it?

Jetty's main configuration file is jetty.xml.

pom.xml is part of an Apache Maven project. Even if you choose to deploy said project to Jetty, that file will not be present in the war/ear file you deploy to Jetty.

Yes, the announcement that IBM joined OpenJDK development really meant that IBM left Apache Harmony.

Be surprised then ;) I worked on contract for IBM in the financial sector, and the very core of every bank, insurance corp or stock exchange I came across is some sort of transaction system (cics, ims) with a huge code base of COBOL packages. These systems run on shiny new big irons and the software is everything but ancient. Nobody risks to replace the core applications, they are the most stable systems I have ever seen and fast as hell. This is the sole reason COBOL will and cannot die in the foreseeable future.

Everything else runs on top of systems, they are the backbone of the financial world.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28842.wss

Gives some details on how people are working on this, and a lot of people have ideas for refinement of the process. Based on what I've seen, I don't see any reason we won't have a complete neuron map within 5 years, 10 at the outside. It certainly seems likely to come sooner than we'll have the computer power to execute it in real time.

I agree with all your points, but Java using an interpreter?

Java has used JIT complication of a very long time now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation.

In fact some JVMs can even recompile on the fly after it gathers runtime data for even better performance http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-jtp12214/.

I didn't say it was moral, good for you, or the route to improved community(s) relationships. It is what Oracle does: make money.

No, you're not listening, er reading. You don't make money by paying billions of dollars buying a company then dumping that company's products. Nor do you as a software business make money by treating developers of your platform like shit. Oracle is foolhardy doing so. Sure right now they're the 800 pound gorilla but there are other enterprise scale databases on the market. Microsoft will even help customers transition from Oracle to SQL Server. IBM has it's own offering, DB2 as does HP. Of course there are also open source based DBMSs such as ones based on PostgreSQL, Computer Associates spin-off Ingres, and Firebird.

Falcon

A police force of 10,000 people is whining because they get approximately 100 calls per hour? Give me a break. Government service at its best...

What I especially like are the calls "threatening post on facebook". Your tax dollars at work - society has turned into a bunch of whining women, and the police themselves are no exception.

There are only 9 labs which are real IBM Research Laboratories: Almaden, Austin, Brazil, China, India, Haifa, Tokyo, Watson and Zurich

linky: http://www.research.ibm.com/worldwide/index.shtml which does not list Sao Paolo, Brazil yet though.

This new one in Australia is just a new IBM R&D center, part of IBM, but not part of IBM Research though....

And yet, that's old technology (Apple released their 30" monitor in 2004 ... that's the same one they still sell today. Even earlier than that, IBM sold a 200dpi greyscale monitor back near 1999/2000 that was 2560x2048, intended for doctors viewing x-rays.

Before the HD standards were finalized, you could get higher resolution TVs, because there was no limit set.

Samsung and a few others had "Quad HD" monitors (3840 x 2160) on the market for a while, but I believe they've all been discontinued. (and it also cost something like US$25k)

It seems IBM is a big player/user in Second Life. They even have a corporate client for Second Life.

http://ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-social-secondlife/index.html

From this link:

Meetig, collaborating, and brainstorming in a virtual world

Global Innovation Outlook at IBM dives into Second Life
"Our USC participants were impressed by the interactive nature of the GIO Conference. The tools and approach inspired us to re-examine how we use our own Second Life environment," Jerry Whitfield, associate director, Marshall School of Business, said.
Virtual worlds are good for many things. They are great places to escape from reality for a while, wear outrageous clothes, or meet a complete stranger from around the world. But as IBM's Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) team (see Resources) found out last month, virtual worlds are also a great place to host a very real-world, business-oriented roundtable discussion. ....

There are a bunch of developerWorks articles about Second Life, like: www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-second-life-1.html - Second Life client, Part 1: Hacking Second Life..

To say nothing of the Power 7 795, which scales to 256 cores with 4-way SMT, for 1024 hardware threads.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/795/index.html

And AIX 7 will handle this in a single-system image:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/v71/preview.html

Desktop operating systems, indeed.

To say nothing of the Power 7 795, which scales to 256 cores with 4-way SMT, for 1024 hardware threads.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/795/index.html

And AIX 7 will handle this in a single-system image:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/v71/preview.html

Desktop operating systems, indeed.

The K42 project at IBM Research investigated the benefit of a complete OS rewrite with scalability to very large SMP systems in mind. This is an open source operating system supporting Linux-compatible API and ABI.

Their target systems, "next generation SMP systems", back in 2003 seems to have become the current generation of SMP/multi-core systems in the meantime.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/info/x/3755m3/

"With up to 48 cores..."

Got a pile of AIX servers here like that:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/780/index.html

I was kind of wondering about the "modern operating systems" comment... I think he meant "desktop operating systems".
Many of the big OS vendors (IBM, DEC (now HP), CRAY, etc) are well beyond this point. Even OS/2 could scale to 1024 processors if I recall correctly.

Here are a couple, by the way:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/music/music_clips.html

I've heard Esperanto hymns that are less embarrassing.

Clearly, China wants to kick the world's ass in gaming. Thousands of dollars are at stake.

If they're worried about China advancing in computer technology, maybe they shouldn't build research labs there!

. . . and don't forget, meat choppers: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV2154.html . . . for . . . ?

USB is ubiqutous [sic] because intel put it on all their motherboards, not because apple forced the issue. What apple does is leave people in the lurch with no recourse. That isn't vision or inivation [sic] or design. It's simple asshattery.

Intel and Microsoft's participation was certainly necessary for USB to become ubiquitous, however what Apple did was to create a viable market for USB by providing a few million customers who had no other choice for connectivity with the first iMac designs. It made little economic sense to sell USB peripherals to people with Intel machines when you could reach a larger market with the "legacy" connectors. Those manufactures who had previously sold product to the Apple serial and ADB market found their former customers now unable to use the stuff they were manufacturing so they HAD to make USB devices. As a bonus they got to sell to the Intel market for "free" or only the price of a software driver. Witness the glut of Bondi-blue USB devices from that era.

Apple removed the "chicken-or-egg" problem by creating a market for a relatively new and relatively unsupported standard.

From IBM is a pretty similar analysis of the economics and the significant role of the iMac: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec7.html

Enter the iMac.

The original "bondi blue" iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports without offering "legacy" ports. That's right -- no serial ports, no ADB. This changes the network effects. Before the iMac showed up, there were many millions of PC users who had no USB ports and perhaps a couple of million who had a USB port and also legacy ports. The biggest market in 1998 was in serial and parallel ports (or joystick ports, PS/2 ports, and so on) -- there was no reason to target the USB market. That would just restrict your audience.

The iMac presented a ready-made market of users who chose the Mac line for its graphics capability. In turn, the iMac offered a captive audience of users who would buy a USB peripheral but would not buy any other kind of peripheral. These users provided a market for USB peripherals that wasn't facing competition from other port choices. The result was a flood of USB devices in white-and-blue plastic. This was a crucial turning point that created a reason (tied to a proven system choice) to prefer USB to non-USB ports.

Once adoption was foist onto this substantial segment of users, the technical merits of the technology won out easily. USB's technical superiority (for most peripherals) to the conglomeration of a half-dozen different port types was unambiguous.