[Coco] RE: [Color Computer] Re: Why USB would be nice.

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 16:20 -0600, Glen VanDenBiggelaar wrote:
> I am not looking for a magic bullet, just some justification on why USB is 
> so sought after. So far, other than the "cool factor" no real  facts have 
> been brought forward. I went over all of this in the last thread though, and 
> no one then could bring forward a valid point.
> -Glen
> 

You're a hard man to argue with, Glen, mostly because you reject out of
hand every example anyone puts up. There have been lots of valid points.

Let's try this again, off the top of my head:

USB hard drives
USB flash drives
USB floppy drives
USB Bluetooth
USB wifi
Modern Serial ports (with proper flow control, higher baud rates)
Modern bidirectional parallel ports
Ethernet
Graphics tablets
Keyboard
Mice
Modern joystick controllers

All with ONE reasonably priced interface, at commodity prices for the
add-ons (or free if you happen to already have the device, which many of
us do have). Now if you are the boy with all the toys and you have all
this already, no need for it. But I'm wondering where you got the coco
Ethernet and coco graphics tablet interface (the venerable 256x192 X-pad
maybe?).

Not to mention that there is no way to hook a USB hard drive even to an
IDE controller, or a usb floppy drive to a classic coco floppy
controller. So if you have one of these already (you don't it seems) and
you wish to use them, you're out of luck.

Now there is always a possibility that some of the network stuff might
not be able to be made to work, but there's no reason to assume that
just yet. KA9Q network stack, and Contiki proves the stack itself can
run on 8-bit hardware. The only issue then is whether there is something
about the interface that coco can't keep pace with. But TCP
automatically scales back its pace if the receiver drops packets. So it
might just all work out.

So until shown otherwise I think it's reasonable to assume networking
would be one killer app.

-- John.