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What USB Has Replaced (And What it Hasn't) (arstechnica.co.uk)

Posted by timothy on from the tab-a-slot-micro-b dept.

An anonymous reader writes with a story at Ars Technica about the evolution thus far of USB as an enabling technology: Like all technology, USB has evolved over time. Despite being a 'Universal' Serial Bus, in its 18-or-so years on the market it has spawned multiple versions with different connection speeds and many, many types of cables. A casual search around the shelves by my desk shows that I've got at least 12 varieties, and that's not even counting serial and PS/2 adapters. What have you replaced with USB?

5 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Not replaced: serial and parallel ports. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Serial ports, because you don't need a complex microcontroller and driver stack just to throw a few bytes between two machines.

    2. Parallel ports, because sometimes you want some basic high/low monitoring on a few lines and you don't want some ridiculous custom peripheral just to do this.

    1. Re:Not replaced: serial and parallel ports. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Or, just use an FT232 and connect your UART to an emulated serial port. Having a true hardware serial port is useful at times, but for micro-controllers an FT232 with a USB connection on one end and the uart on the other is usually easier...

    2. Re:Not replaced: serial and parallel ports. by dotancohen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      1. Serial ports, because you don't need a complex microcontroller and driver stack just to throw a few bytes between two machines.

      The poster seems to not understand what the words "universal" and "bus" mean in "Universal Serial Bus". He has 12 different varieties of physical connectors, but they all use (different compatible versions of) that same bus protocol, so he can simply use an adapter to interconnect between them. His PS/2 "adapter" is unreliable, does not completely support either the PS/2 or USB protocols, and will not work with many high-draw PS/2 HID devices, such as the PS/2 Model M keyboards (Lexmark, then Unicomp). Rather, there is a 'standard' mapping of PS/2 connectors to USB that most USB controllers support, but that is a USB feature.

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  2. Pretty much everything by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    USB's been the connector of choice for most of my peripherals. It replaced the floppy drive connector for portable media. It replaced dedicated connectors for keyboards, mice, tablets and the like. My headsets are almost always USB, whether they're wired or wireless. Webcams. The only things I don't use it for are primary networking (hardwired Ethernet there), non-portable mass storage (hard drives and optical drives), and video. Sometimes I still use the PS/2 keyboard connector for non-Windows UEFI systems where a USB keyboard won't get initialized during POST. It's fast enough, there's typically more than enough connectors (especially with a hub for non-latency-sensitive devices), and it's almost universally present and usable.

  3. Re: USB is a support nightmare by Redmancometh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Found the guy who last used or upgraded Windows a decade ago.