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Rendezvous Developer Stuart Cheshire Interviewed
overunderunderdone writes "Found this interview of Stuart Cheshire, the Apple employee who developed Rendezvous (a.k.a. Zeroconf) and co-chairs the ZEROCONF working group. He provides some interesting history behind Zeroconf. But I thought his ideas for the future of Rendezvous was more interesting. He envisions a single protocol for everything from the keyboard, hard disk, peripherals, to the net connection -- just one kind of socket in the back of your box."
IR is basically a serial port that uses IR instead of a wire to make the interconnect. Bluetooth uses 900Mhz to make the interconnect instead of LED's. USB is another serial protocol, just faster than RS-232. Same with firewire, just faster still. For the most part they are really just varied serial ports.
Ethernet(10BT,100BT,1000BT) is a bit different.
What we are seeing with firewire and USB is a progression of serial protocols towards an ethernet kinda environment, where there may be more than one device on the line at the same time and you can have little hubs/switches to coordinate the traffic.
I wouldn't really say that many of them are optimized for one thing or another. IR is just as limited as an RS-232 port, just made it easier on notebook designers to save space. USB was done since rs-232 had some serious speed limitations. Firewire for pretty much the same reason. Bluetooth - well...it was more of a way to elimnate wires...cool idea.