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What USB Has Replaced (And What it Hasn't) (arstechnica.co.uk)
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?
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.
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.
like usb3?
...I know I haven't managed to replace serial ports. I haven't found any stable RS232 converter on USB...
Either drivers don't work, or everything I get is badly made (fake?).
Kind of weird that *serial* ports don't work well on an *universal serial bus*. But ah well.
Before USB, the PC had parallel ports, serial ports, Keyboard and mouse ports, ALL of which were unencumbered by patents and none of which required ID codes that had to be purchased from a monopolistic trade entity for $4000 or more. There was a minimal cost of entry for anybody in a garage who had a clever idea for something to add to a PC and even individuals could quickly hack together an interface to some custom hardware via the parallel port with no need for complex USB code and drivers. If you only plan to make a hundred gadgets, USB is insane. The Price to get a required ID number for your gadget is not reasonable, and if you use a USB-to-Serial chip with somebody else's ID number, you have essentially admitted you could have just used a standard serial port but are putting extra junk in your design because the host PC is missing the old standard serial port.
Microsoft hated this openness because it meant a huge array of stuff with which they had to avoid breaking compatibility in each new Windows release, so they wanted it all replaced in the PC99 spec with USB. At the time, they pretended no modern computer could run efficiently while connected to such old slow interfaces (something Linux proves is false) and that this was all for the benefit of the users.
Sadly, most people seem not to realize that many of the things (like mice,keyboards,serial adapters, etc) that use USB do not even need its speed. We would all have been much better served with an open, un-patented, USB-type interface without the MPEG-LA-style USB authority. There's no reason why ID numbers should not be bought as easily as MAC numbers (i.e. if a developer wants a few without going to the responsible authority, he can buy s cheap EEPROM from somebody like Microchip with a unique assigned number already burned-in).
USB is a very "mixed-bag" - better for live connect/disconnect, power and management on std cables and cons, but soul-sucking rights-hogging and freedom-squelching.
Personally, I'd like to see the whole industry replace USB with PoE (NOT using the infamous and un-necessary PoE patents). Drop all interfaces on a PC and do EVERYTHING with PoE - Keyboards, mice, printers, scanners, drives, everything. An open UDP-based protocol stack could be used to ID devices and detect when they plug-in. All devices could have standard (royalty-free) assigned device type codes just as we have standard assigned numbers. There's no reason other than control and royalties for why we need an authority selling numbers over a desktop bus.
No one ever figured out the right way to power a little fan attached to the chop sticks to cool your noodles as you pull them from the bowl, till USB came along. And there were some twenty more such crazy things powered by USB.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Unlike ethernet, which is pretty much standard from platform to platform and basically trivial to support, USB code is completely different between linux, OS X, and Windows, and is a mess, API-wise.
I write software defined radio stuff, and after one incredible nightmare getting a USB SDR to work on all three platforms using conditional compilation (I did succeed), I swore off. No more. If it doesn't have an ethernet interface, or a USB-to-ethernet server app compatible with the standard SDR protocols that makes it appear to me as an ethernet SDR, it's not happening.
Luckily, some of the best SDR manufacturers out there have done it right. Andrus, AFDRI, and RFSPACE. And there are some servers that have been built to hide the abortion of USB, but so far they are very much platform-specific, for the very reason I described above.
USB. Ugh.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.